Original subtitles

♪ [Marching band music]

Madison, Wisconsin 1963...

Year-end news in review.

Madison, Wisconsin, 1963...

The city voted "the Best Place to Live in America,"

and the home of the University of Wisconsin.

Fanning out along 4 lakes,

surrounded by dairy farms and cheese factories,

Madison's elm-lined streets stretch like slow dancers

from the state capitol.

♪ [Marching band music continues]

Madison, Wisconsin, 1963...

It was an unprecedented boom year for Madison.

More than 50 new retail stores opened,

the University's enrollment jumped 8%,

the suburbs grew and commuter bus ridership swelled.

♪ [More marching band music]

Everyone did "“The Twist."”

Stiletto thin pants are worn so tight they look like tattoos,

and bouffant hair-dos balloon out just like

madras shirt-waist dresses.

Ron Vander Kelen, the Badgers' star quarterback,

hurled the pigskin in the 3rd largest football stadium

in the Big Ten,

leading the University of Wisconsin

all the way to the Rose Bowl.

Madison is the American prescription.

It's the All-American town.

♪ [Marching band music fades out]

Ken, why do you plan to burn your personal check in front of

the Internal Revenue Service building

here in Madison this morning.

I would like to protest against the income tax system

because of where most of the money goes.

Fifty cents on the dollar goes for

what the government likes to call "national defense,"

euphemistically, "defense."

And 10% is earmarked especially for Vietnam,

which I consider to be an immoral war.

I should really know how to start a fire,

I was an Eagle Scout when I was a kid.

♪ [Guitar music with harmonica]

♪ Oh the foes will rise with the sleep still in their eyes

♪ and they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'

♪ But they'll pinch themselves and squeal

♪ and they'll know that it's for real

♪ the hour that the ship comes in

♪ And they'll raise their hands, say we'll meet all your demands

♪ and we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered

♪ And like Pharaoh's tribe, they'll be drownded in the tide

♪ And like Goliath they'll be conquered

It was just a year ago that you ordered

stepped up aid to Vietnam.

There seems to be a good deal of discouragement

about the progress.

Can you give us your assessment?

No, we are putting in a major effort in Vietnam.

As you know, we have about

10 or 11 times as many men there as we had a year ago.

They are...

We've had a number of casualties.

We've put in an awful lot of equipment.

We're going ahead with the Strategic Hamlet proposal.

Some phases, the military program

has been quite successful.

There is great difficulty however

in fighting a guerilla war.

You need 10 to one or 11 to one,

especially in terrain as difficult as South Vietnam.

But I'm...

So we're not...

We don't see the end of the tunnel but I must say,

I don't think it's darker than it was a year ago.

In some ways, lighter.

When I first came to Madison, I was looking for something

I could do to help change what was going on,

and I just happened to run into some people

who were working with

Americans for Reappraisal of Far Eastern Policy.

In working with that group, I looked into

a lot of U.S. foreign policy.

And foreign policy was directed to getting control

of the Far East or the Pacific Basin.

So I began to see this

as I looked through Eisenhower's statements

and some of the others.

Now let us assume that we lose Indochina.

If Indochina goes,

the tin and the tungsten

that we so greatly value from that area would cease coming.

Somewhere along the line, this must be blocked.

It must be blocked now.

So by the time Vietnam really became an issue I was...

I had already looked into the background of our policy there.

Today, the United States is in Vietnam...

The first antiwar demonstrations

specifically involving Vietnam

took place in October,

about mid-October of 1963,

a month before President Kennedy was assassinated.

And the main thrust of the demonstration was to

to attack the presence of U.S. military advisors in Vietnam.

It seemed there must have been about 150, maybe 200 people

who were present, listening to a number of speeches.

I don't know that anybody felt that they were

going to accomplish anything by being there.

They were there more as a matter of principle.

...we become totally receptive and we walk along like sheep.

♪ [Dramatic background music]

Swift and sure has been U.S. retaliation

for communist P.T. Boat attacks on the high seas.

This is theMaddox,

one of the two destroyers that were attacked while

patrolling international waters

in the Gulf of Tonkin near North Vietnam.

Warplanes from two carriers,

theTiconderoga and theConstellation

avenged the unwarranted red assault

with 64 sorties to North Vietnam P.T. bases.

The U.S. sorties were launched for one purpose...

as a warning to the communists

that unprovoked attacks will bring prompt response.

Now the story was false to begin with

because the destroyer Maddox was not on a routine patrol

in international waters.

She had penetrated the coastal waters of South Vietnam.

She was within their waters.

She was a spy ship.

She was not on a routine patrol like a destroyer.

She had been equipped the week before with

elaborate electronic devices,

and she was doing this at a very time when

South Vietnamese P.T. boats,

supplied by the United States,

with crews trained by the United States,

were bombarding the North Vietnamese ports.

In other words, we were engaged in an act of aggression

at the very time Johnson was preparing to claim

that we were fighting aggression.

We Americans know,

although others appear to forget,

the risk of spreading conflicts.

We still seek no wider war.

One...

Two...

Three...

Four...

Five...

Seven...

Six...

Six...

Eight...

Nine...

Ten, nine, eight, seven,

six, five, four, three,

two, one, zero.

[Thunderous nuclear blast]

[President Lyndon B. Johnson] These are the stakes...

To make a world in which all of God's children can live.

Or to go into the darkness.

We must either love each other...

Or we must die.

[Narrator] Vote for President Johnson on November 3.

The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

A month before the election,

President Johnson said that he was not going

to send American troops

to fight a war that

Asian troops should fight themselves.

♪ Fighting soldiers from the sky

♪ Fearless men who jump and die

♪ Men who mean

♪ just what they say

♪ The brave men

♪ of the Green Berets

On this Monday morning in Vietnam,

at my direction,

United States aircraft

have struck the lines of supply which support

the continuing movement

of men and arms

against the people and the government of South Vietnam.

Our air strikes on North Vietnam

from the beginning

have been aimed at military targets

and have been controlled with the greatest of care.

[Explosion]

So when the bombings start,

the demonstrations immediately pick up,

and the community in effect was ready to react to it.

There was already a highly mobile,

politically sophisticated group

that was the core of a couple hundred people

who over the next 4 or 5 years were really

in my estimation, the heart of the Antiwar Movement.

What do you think of this protest demonstration

against the actions in Vietnam?

All they're doing is giving propaganda to

the North Vietnamese, the Red Chinese

or the Communists.

And I think...

if they would sit down intelligently...

go over what is being done in Washington,

they might go along with President Johnson,

cause he is trying to get out of there,

but he's doing it in a little bit more diplomatic way.

The first day I got off the bus almost in Madison,

I saw the literature table of

The Committee to End The War In Vietnam.

That was quite a shock, cause I was still

basically coming out of northern New York,

an all-American boy

whose political values were conservative.

But also I was quite curious, so I always took the literature.

This was after I'd already been enrolled in ROTC.

When I first went to the university, my father said,

"Don't get involved in any organizations.

"Don't get involved in any demonstrations

"because the government will get your name

"and they'll put it in their file and

"they'll use it against you for the rest of your life."

So I said, "Well," I said to myself, "I'm not getting...

"I'll just stand by the sidelines,

"and watch and see what's going on here,

"but I don't want to get involved."

I finally decided I was gonna go to an SDS meeting.

I remember the night I decided I was gonna go,

I ate dinner and then I decided I wasn't gonna go

cause I was sure there was something that

I was going to get in trouble about for going to the meeting.

Then I decided I would go, then I decided I wouldn't.

I decided I'd walk down by the union

and see what was going on.

Maybe I'd go in, maybe I wouldn't.

Finally, I said, "To hell with it,

"I'm being intimidated,

"I'm supposed to be able to do what I want."

So I went to the meeting.

What attracted me about SDS was the fact that

they were interested in the total picture.

It wasn't an antiwar group in any sense at all.

My feeling was that there had to be a total change.

I wasn't really interested in politics,

I was just tired of the life

that was being presented to me, and I wanted to change that.

I recall now that at that time

it was a relatively quiet campus.

And someone told me when I took the job that

my most difficult job would be dealing with the ruffled dignity

of a professor who had a problem with his parking ticket.

Well, of course, that's all changed...

And I soon saw that the campus was anything but

a quiet campus.

There were extensive demonstrations

all over the country,

not just in the Madisons or the Berkeleys

or the East Coast universities.

I remember Iowa and the University of Illinois

had had demonstrations and in reaction

to the bombings in Vietnam.

So what happened is the government sent out

these "truth teams" to the campuses.

And they were gonna go from campus to campus,

and tell us the morality of what was taking place

and the political justification for it.

I think one of the problems you people are gonna have is

you think by coming here and telling us what the policy is,

then we will agree with it.

I think you're working under the assumption

that we don't realize what the policy is.

I don't think anything...

This is what Johnson has told us and this is what we understand.

This is what we understand by these missions.

Have I said anything to you at all?

I'm telling you what I understand.

All I plan to do is, as I said earlier,

to come here with this group

to share our experience with you

to discuss this question with you.

They would go and they'd lecture for half an hour, 45 minutes.

I remember the kind of thing we went through...

The representative of the Defense Department was asked,

"What does napalm do?"

So he gave a technical description of napalm,

being a gel and so on.

The crowd was rumbling.

Question came up, "What does napalm do?"

He says, "Well, it can catch on fire."

Kept on hitting away, "What does napalm really do?"

The general said, "You really want to know what it does?

"It burns, it burns people."

Finally out of frustration,

he decided to just tell the truth,

which everybody already knew.

It was a good thing to confront students

with what you called a "truth squad".

And a lot of students are much more convinced now

than they were before that we're not very likely

to get candid answers from anyone in the administration

in defense of our policy in Vietnam.

It was in the spring of 1965 that we saw the first...

overt action against the government.

About 8 to 12 people, I can't remember the exact number,

went out to the airbase here in Madison to, in effect,

a citizen's arrest of the base commander for war crimes.

The airbase was a symbol of the military in our community and

that's where the confrontation had to take place.

The leaders of the Antiwar Movement were infuriated.

The whole issue of civil disobedience

threatened the hell out of them

because they felt that only legalistic methods would attract

the majority of middle class students they hoped to reach

as members of the community.

There were threats that came into us from Truax Airbase

that we would be shot.

The place was covered with journalists.

We asked to see the head of the airbase to have him informed

that we wanted entrance to the base

and that we planned to arrest him.

He refused to come out.

We maintained our presence there and

people were arrested and carried away to jail.

[Protesters chanting]

What do you think of the Peace Movement in this country?

I don't think that the people that are advocating it

or standing behind it understand the overall situation.

They don't understand the Asiatic mind

and they don't understand that we're endeavoring to stop

communism on the line over there,

and not permit it to spread to free nations.

A number of us, including

Congressman Ben Rosenthal, who is here today with me,

had asked that the Foreign Affairs Committee hold hearings,

public hearings, on the question of Vietnam.

They have not done so.

It is my feeling then

that if there are not to be hearings in Washington

on this crucial question,

we ought to have hearings at the grassroots, back home.

And this, as far as I know, is the first effort of this type.

This hearing is a brave thing.

And it is good that it is first held in the Midwest

which has often been called "“a hotbed of lethargy."”

What is not good is that we must wait until a time of crisis

before putting the machinery of democracy into high gear.

Gentlemen...

I ask you to tell your colleagues

that we in the Peace Center

like thousands of students throughout this country

are willing to defend and support

democratic and social revolution

if only this government has the courage to do so.

But if it does not,

we believe that this government must be changed.

After having heard about the hearings,

I felt it my duty to speak out my concern.

I have four children and I'm a housewife.

I have never done anything political other than voting,

and I'm not particularly interested in politics.

But I do read the papers, and I'm confused by the news.

I talk to people

and I don't like what I hear.

If this war is so unpredictable and goes on for 6 years,

7 years, decades...

my children could be drawn into this horror.

I have read and heard about some of the atrocities,

and it is unbearable for me to know

that our boys are taught and made

to use napalm and phosphorous bombs.

I try to teach my children the value

of individual human worth,

and I don't want this destroyed by my country.

I do not have a solution to the war,

but I do want a solution, and I want you to find it.

Thank you.

[Applause]

♪ Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans

♪ at the end of the early British war

♪ The young land started growing, the young blood started flowing

♪ But I ain't marchin' anymore

♪ For I've killed my share of Injuns

♪ in a thousand different fights

♪ I was there at the Little Big Horn

♪ I heard many men a-lying, I saw many more a-dying

♪ but I ain't marchin' anymore

♪ It's always the old to lead us to the wars

♪ Always the young to fall

♪ Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun

♪ Tell me is it worth it all?

[Protesters] Hell, no! We won't go!

Hell, no! We won't go!

I wasn't gonna go, that much I knew.

I had already made a decision, no matter what happened,

I wasn't going.

So it wasn't that difficult to cope with the situation.

This is just at the time now

when the draft card burnings were taking place.

And the draft then was just merely

a means of which to attack

the military and try and disrupt the military effort.

The draft was very important at that time

to our young people because

everyone at college age was a potential for

serving in the armed forces.

This meant an interruption to their education.

Also it meant potentially the effect of them

fighting in an unpopular war.

That was spring of '66.

The government was trying to get

more and more people to fight in Vietnam.

For the first time,

they were talking about drafting college students.

so this meant that not only poor people

were going to have to fight in Vietnam,

but also children of the middle class.

If you took this test as a college student,

you passed the test, you got to stay in school.

If you flunked the test, you got sent to Vietnam

is basically what it was.

You lost your student deferment.

So they would have these tests out at the Field House,

and we went out there and we would picket.

And eventually some demands were drafted against the university,

insisting that they not

participate with the Selective Service System,

that they not send in grade points,

that they not give the test on campus.

And these demands were delivered to the university

with an ultimatum.

Well...

"Do it or else."

I don't remember whether we said

what "the else" was.

Well some of the politicos, shall we say,

the professional BS-ers that we had around them

were up negotiating with the administration.

a meeting was held in front of

the administration building

to hear the answer.

Well, none of the politicos were there yet,

so myself and Bob Zwicker and John Cumbler

moved that we take over the Administration Building.

And the people who were there said, "Sure".

And we all walked in and sat down.

The sit-in started.

There was an underground network of people

putting out the word to go in...

to sit in at the new Administration Building.

It was fairly ingenious.

People were being asked to go in

and get copies of their transcripts duplicated,

saying that they'd lost their student ID cards.

All kinds of things like that.

to get into the building and have access

prior to the time the building closed,

so as not to alert the fact that there was something coming down.

And slowly over the hours, it begins to grow,

so that by after dinner that evening,

I guess there probably were 1,000, 1,500 in the building.

I was in the building most of the time.

I was down there in a sense for temperature control.

And my observations were such that,

that I saw no evidence of any hostility here.

But in evening, during the evening hours,

the crowds would swell.

There would be various speakers

speaking on the issue of the war in Vietnam and

and the draft and how it affected

young people who had them.

This is what I'd come to the university for

and never found it in any classes.

There was a real feeling of openness, of learning,

that people were studying together actually

right there in the building

because the draft was not the only issue.

The wider issue was the war in Vietnam,

and people were talking about the war in Vietnam.

I was learning things I had never learned before

and I was learning them in a way I had never learned before.

The major thing that I got out of that sit-in,

I think everybody else did was a sense of doing things together

of fighting back together.

There was an incredible sense of community that

I don't think anybody had ever experienced in there before.

The thing lasted for maybe 4 or 5 days,

and during the course of that time,

the Wisconsin Student Association voted its support,

the first political stand it had ever made.

The Inter-Fraternity Council voted its support.

The student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal,

supported it, the first thing it had ever done.

That forced fraternity people to think about the war.

And I was much more, I guess I was

in the liberal wing by that time of my fraternity.

And we supported the sit-in.

If you can show us how to get out of Vietnam without

destroying the freedom,

what little freedom is left there,

we'll put the placards that are around here

in the hall of fame...

rather than the hall of shame.

The truth is that the protest

has but one alternative...

Just leave.

Just leave.

That's what Hitler said.

We do not intend to just leave.

[Bombs exploding]

[More bombs]

[Panicked voices, sirens]

The decision to strike these targets

was made to restrict and to make more costly

the enemy's infiltration efforts.

We believe this is essential to help safeguard

the freedom of South Vietnam

and to save the lives of those South Vietnamese,

Americans, Australians,

New Zealanders and Koreans

who are fighting to insure that freedom.

I think the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong struck me so deeply

because it brought back a memory of my own childhood.

One of the earliest memories I have as a kid is

having to wear a copper dog tag in a public school in New York.

I asked the teacher, "Why do we have to wear

"these identification tags?" And she said,

so that when a bomb hit us,

and in case we were incinerated,

these tags would allow us to be identified.

I remember the day that Hanoi-Haiphong was bombed

by the United States,

thinking about that incident.

♪ [Vietnamese instrumental music]

♪ [Vienamese music fades out]

We were trying to build a mass movement.

What I mean by that is

a movement dealing with all the issues,

of as many people as possible.

we spent the summer working on forming a tenant union,

setting up our own newspaper,

trying to develop communications.

I mean we were trying to build a whole counterculture.

And at that time, I for one thought

the war in Vietnam would be over within months.

I felt that the war in Vietnam

was not the right place to center the organizing,

that the right place was on all social issues,

to try to create a new society...

I was head of SDS during that time,

for the next year and that's the way I guided it.

In 1966 when I first came to Madison...

The black students

weren't really that involved in the war issue...

their main concern was the Black Power question,

the question that Stokely Carmichael had raised that year

as a result of the James Meredith march

through Mississippi.

We wanted to make it well known to ourselves

and to the community at large

that we wanted to identify ourselves

as black students in particular.

And we didn't want to just fall into

the general organization, as it were.

We had announced on the first day of school

that we would not allow any speakers

from the federal government

to speak at the university campus.

So several people in turn, including Hubert Humphrey,

had cancelled planned speeches.

They sent Teddy Kennedy sort of as a junior brother lackey

to test out the water to see how hot it was.

We went out to the, I don't remember...

the Cow Palace.

Teddy Kennedy was coming in to speak.

Pat Lucey was running for governor.

In walks Kennedy and

people were well-placed throughout the audience.

I was in the audience

because I was still taken by the Kennedys,

and was really excited about seeing Teddy Kennedy.

So our strategy for the Kennedy demonstration

was to put a large number of people,

maybe 30 or 40,

behind the platform so that when we shouted,

the microphones on the platform would pick up our voices

and carry them out into the auditorium.

At the same time, a member of the audience,

one of our group was to start speaking

and addressing questions to Senator Kennedy.

What is that, what's your...? Why don't we...

Are you a spokesman?

Would you like to ask the first question?

So there I am sitting

and all of a sudden people start screaming,

"What about the war? What about the war?"

You know, you know the...

We know what you're against.

The real question is what you're for.

It was an interesting situation because he actually

invited one of our members onto the platform with him

and was able

in the course of a few quick, if you will, wise-ass remarks,

to win the audience to his side.

I'd like to talk about the war, it's a complicated issue.

Now I think we can extend

that wonderful bargain that we had and...

Oh no, it wasn't a bargain.

You asked me to stay, and talk for 3 minutes.

The only thing that I'd like to hear and which, I would,

is what the solution is.

At that point, the question before us was...

Do we allow him to finish

because he has won a rhetorical victory over us?

Or do we stick to our political principles

that our campus is not gonna be used as a platform

for the administration?

And we quickly made the latter decision,

and disrupted the speech.

Let me say that under the...

under the questions of...

Under... I hear the question.

[Disruptive yelling]

I was caught in the middle because here I was again,

the ROTC cadet.

I thought Kennedy had a responsibility

to talk about it,

and I thought that he was shirking that duty.

I also thought that, well,

maybe that the committee did more to discredit themselves

by disrupting the meeting.

Cause I don't think that you'd hope to list a persuasion

with the kind of representation you've made this afternoon,

but I'm delighted to at least express

what my position would be.

I'd be unalterably opposed at the present time of

unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops in Southeast Asia.

The next day, petitions went out all over the campus.

But at that time, I was really torn personally

between the guilt of feeling,

"Wow, we really did something to embarrass Senator Kennedy,"

But on the other hand, we were right.

I felt guilty that I didn't know whether to sign it or not.

So I eventually didn't sign it.

The embarrassment of confrontation,

I hadn't yet come to terms with personally.

[Sounds of helicopters, machine guns firing]

We had to tell the government

in unmistakable terms

that we would not support the war,

that we thought it was immoral and illegal.

And we wanted to make a protest that they could not ignore...

They couldn't just wash off.

♪ [Vietnamese instrumental music]

In 1967, I left Madison to go to North Vietnam

with a group of Quakers to deliver medical supplies

to the North Vietnamese civilians.

We sailed from Japan on a 50-foot boat,

which was a ketch, a two-masted schooner.

We carried $10,000 worth of medical supplies

lashed to the deck of this boat.

There were 8 men and myself on the trip.

As you can guess, I got the job of cooking.

Mrs. Boardman, has it been difficult for you to arrive at a

very overt commitment such as this?

Emotionally and intellectually?

Oh anything like this is hard.

But once you've carried a sign,

once you've made the first step, it's easier the next time.

You always feel like a fool.

Is that what you mean?

Some people thought that I was some kind of a heroine.

And a lot of people thought that I was a traitor.

I was very confident that what I was doing was right.

It just didn't occur to me that it might not be,

even though some people said it wasn't.

I was sure it was the right thing to do.

As it turned out here in 1967,

Dow was accused not only by students here at Wisconsin, but

by students practically across the country of

manufacturing napalm.

And a napalm bomb, when it shatters on impact

is supposed to severely burn,

destroy whatever it comes in contact with.

Dow Chemical was a big corporation here.

And Dow Chemical recruited chemical engineers

and other professional people from the campus

for careers in their various operations.

So we decided that since Dow was coming in February,

the Dow recruiter, we would also have a demonstration.

So at our 15-person meeting still,

we moved that we would sit-in,

and hold the guy there until he was willing to leave campus.

So it was decided that we were gonna have

a picket around these recruiters.

What we had was these pictures from Ramparts Magazine

of napalmed kids.

Almost everybody had a picket sign like that.

And we were gonna go into the buildings

and stand right outside the office

and form a gauntlet,

and force these people who were gonna recruit for the jobs

to see what they were getting into.

The idea was to confront people

and make them face up to what was going on.

We took the attitude that,

and I think SDS took this all along

through its whole history,

that you don't talk people into things.

You take an action and force them to confront the situation.

What really seared my mind in the Dow demonstration

was the counter-pickets.

They were my fellow ROTC cadets.

And they were carrying signs.

The only one that I really remember was,

"Napalm is good for V.C. acne."

It just confirmed everything that the...

the anti-Dow demonstrators were saying.

In the fall, Dow was coming back and...

the university had really

challenged us to try to stop them

by its actions the last time.

It was clear that the university was gonna protect Dow.

There was a lot of talk about free speech...

People were... free speech for the recruiters,

free speech for capitalists to make money,

free speech for people to kill people.

Today along with my "Roseleip attacks Cardinal" stories,

down below is an item by the Students

For A Democratic Society

to block a chemical company from operating

because it's helping the boys in Vietnam,

furnishing material for those boys.

I think that's very un-American.

There were protest activities going on across the country

and that this is the week that they were to

culminate their activities

at the Pentagon building in Washington, D.C.

And according to the rhetoric,

they were to confront the war-makers.

On the first day, it was a very peaceful, orderly,

well-organized and legal demonstration.

They leafleted people, they used a bullhorn and

explained their reasons to

anybody that wanted to listen to them.

And I ask you to think it over,

to go to your newspapers, to go to the editors,

explain what your position is. They don't understand you.

They don't understand what kind of weapon this is.

And I think it's incumbent upon you

not only to see your editors,

but to engage in some kind of political activity in this city.

[Chanting "Dow Must Go!"]

The climate on campus was

to really do a job on Dow the next day.

So the plan was that

people were going to go up to the Commerce Building again

and sit down and be carried off.

Another nonviolent demonstration.

[Chanting, drumming, horns blowing]

People at that time's consciousness about the war was

at a stage of conscious active resistance.

There was a straight determination

to resist being removed from that building

if the police entered.

[Crowd noise, drums beating]

[Protesters singing] ♪ We shall not be moved...

There was some noise, there was some singing.

I recall that, "“Dow must go!"

"Bring the troops home!"

"Ralph must go."

I was not there as a protester,

I was not there was as an observer for the university.

I was there to observe for myself what was going on.

Within maybe 5 or 10 minutes of looking out over this corridor,

you could just feel a tension mount in the air.

You felt that somebody was going to blunder.

In following procedures that we've gone through before,

I simply called the chief downtown and

indicated that I needed some more help on the campus.

He said that he'd provide the help

and would come to campus himself,

which is exactly what he did.

I cannot quote this exactly, but these are the words

that I remember to the best of my ability,

"Let's go in and take a crack at 'em."

[Protesters yelling, booing]

Fascists!

Fascists!

I was in the building at Dow II...

standing right by the door when the head of the campus police

comes in and announces,

"Everybody, you have one minute,"

...or something like that... "to evacuate the building."

And without even another word, in come 35 policemen.

To this day it's debatable as to what happened

when the police made their first move into the building.

But once they made that first move,

regardless of what happened,

all they did was come in, 4 or 5 at a time,

with clubs swinging and

beat the hell out of everybody in their path

as they swept down the corridor.

Everybody then just ran for it.

At one moment, the police appear at the front of the corridor,

swinging.

And it seemed to me, it was like 10, maybe 5 seconds,

suddenly I was in the front of the group.

Just everybody in front of me disappeared.

I don't know where those people went.

They couldn't have gone into the walls.

That's how fast they moved down that corridor.

people in the rear were trying to go out the back door,

not panicking,

but there just wasn't time to get everybody behind us out.

And that's when they started swinging at us.

I had a heavy lambskin jacket which I pulled up over my head.

The cops were chasing people.

One guy got chased into the bathroom.

Soglin was on the floor in the corner of the hall.

There were 3 cops around him

and they were just pounding the crap out of him.

He was all curled up in a ball and he had a leather jacket on.

And I remember,

I can clearly remember the sound of those clubs

hitting that leather. [Clubbing sound]

After this initial impact,

it was a relatively short period of time

when we were able to accomplish the objective of

clearing the corridor area.

As a matter of fact it took 12 minutes,

but the problem then transferred itself from within the building

to outside of the building.

[Protesters screaming, police beating]

[More student screaming]

[Female protester] Dow must go!

[Panicked shouting]

I was working in my office,

a couple of students came screaming into the office

and said that the students are getting smashed over the heads

in the Dow demonstrations and moved out bodily,

and rounded up.

And I should come and stop it.

I was naive enough to dash out in the belief that

I could tell the police to stop it.

The students were naive enough to believe that if

a professor told police to stop beating students,

that they would stop it.

It seems to me that that really sums up

the historic episode, and so you see...

This famous picture, there are about 6 students right there

that were all my students.

I was standing there, telling the students to leave.

I turned to the police officer and I said,

"I'm a professor, I want the students to clear out of here,

"and you clear out of here."

Obviously while I was explaining to one cop,

another one swung at me,

the students jumped on him and there's that historical picture

and it just turned into another fray.

[Panicked yelling from crowd]

The whole place was like a war zone.

The teargas was going off at that point

and that was what...

The critical moment was the crowd began to gather

because classes were just over when the cops moved in.

And so suddenly, with the crowd getting larger,

and the crowd getting meaner,

they start using the teargas.

And suddenly it's like 4,000, 5,000 kids

who were being affected by this thing.

They wanted to produce casualties.

They sent 65 people to the hospital.

So we were outraged and I can just remember...

All I can remember is rage, just screaming...

"Seig Heil."

[Crowd chanting "Seig Heil"]

Suddenly all these fine, middle class kids

at the University of Wisconsin

are being tear-gassed and clubbed.

I don't know if it's a time shock or what,

but there was an awful lot of political...

politicalization that took place in that 15 - 20 minutes

when the cops just let go with everything they had.

And that night, something called a strike began.

...A general strike!

♪ There's something happening here

♪ What it is ain't exactly clear

♪ There's a man with a gun over there

♪ telling me I got to beware

♪ I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound?

♪ Everybody look what's going down

Reports will indicate that a squad of 50 Madison policemen

were called to the scene,

and were met by an angry, vicious mob

of 300 or more protestors

led by in many cases,

professionals from out of the city.

And that virtually individual officers' reports would indicate

that at times they were fighting for their own lives.

♪ There's battle lines being drawn

♪ Nobody's right if everybody's wrong

♪ Young people speaking their minds

♪ Getting so much resistance from behind

♪ Time we stop, hey, what's that sound?

♪ Everybody look what's going down

♪ What a field day for the heat

♪ a thousand people in the street

♪ singing songs and carrying signs

♪ Mostly say, hooray for our side.

♪ It's s time we stop, hey, what's that sound?

♪ Everybody look what's going down

[Explosion]

In the period that followed Dow,

from the last week of October 67 through the spring of 68,

there was really very little that happened on the campus.

And yet it was in that 4- or 5-month period of time,

from the end of October through April

that the movement turned from student movement

to a community movement against the war.

There were great attempts made by the students

to get material and...

it was not the logic of a pamphlet

or the political sense of a pamphlet,

it was the club of a policeman

who made the remaining part of the community

pay attention to the war.

I went through some

very trying times during the Nazi time.

First in the church resistant movement against Hitler

and then in the political resistant movement.

I was arrested several times, starting 1936...

I was quite young.

And eventually, I was 2 and 1/2 years in jail

and concentration camp and sentenced to death

at the end of the war.

And I was always politically active during the Nazi time.

I was very politically active after the war.

In late '67, I began systematically to try

to organize a group within the community

to put the war in Vietnam on the ballot.

One function of local government is to

inform the national government

what the views of citizens are about issues of national moment.

We had no illusions that in putting a referendum

to bring the war to an end

on the ballot of the city of Madison

that we would stop the war.

But the purpose of it was very clear

and our objective was immediate,

which was that we would take people

who were already opposed to the war

and who had a clear conception of that war

off the campus.

So I was particularly concerned to go into the homes of people

and to explain our opposition to the war to them.

So my 12 year-old daughter and I went around.

I wasn't going to go alone.

And we went around and we talked to the neighbors and asked them

all the questions that were on the list that we had.

And got signatures for the referendum.

That's how I got into it.

This was at a time when Americans

have lost so many lives over there in Vietnam

that the subject could not be avoided anymore

by the general population.

The time was right for some real changes.

That's what the people wanted in Madison and naturally

that had a national effect too with Eugene McCarthy.

[Crowd applause, cheering]

[Delegates cheering, applauding]

♪ [Dixieland jazz music]

[Crowd cheering]

We've begun...

Made a great beginning in New Hampshire.

The next and significant step

here is in the state of Wisconsin.

Something really happened, something clicked in Madison.

There were all kinds of people with McCarthy buttons on,

and people would smile at each other

who had McCarthy buttons on in the library,

and everyone knew what that smile meant.

And then by the time the Wisconsin primary came,

it was almost as if there was a total transformation

of the sororities and fraternities on Langdon Street.

Everyone was against the war.

Now it was respectable to be against the war.

And suppose I was speaking for McCarthy.

You know what they'd say in the question,

"Senator Morse, where was he on this vote and this vote

"and this vote and this vote and this vote?"

Go right on down the line,

where he's never given us

a single vote on the Vietnam issue

except one procedural vote.

We've never had a single vote.

Not a single vote...

from most of the doves.

We backed Eugene McCarthy

because there wasn't anybody else there.

And he was not the best, we thought,

but it was a body.

You put together Soglin's election in that year

with the President withdrawing from the Democratic ticket

with McCarthy winning the primaries that he won,

and I, at that point,

Susie Cream Cheese here again,

believed I think that anything was possible.

[Crowd roaring, band playing] ♪

I'd wanted to go to the convention,

but I hadn't had the time cause I was working.

I found a way to get off from the job

that I was on at the time.

So I decided to hitchhike to Chicago.

Well, the first time that I remember Karl being

active in the war movement was in...

Well, I saw him out at the university demonstration,

and he hollered to me from the group

that was demonstrating there,

He saw me on the sidewalk, says, "Come on, Dad, come on along."

It was like this. I didn't do this at that time.

But right after that time,

he started to become active in the McCarthy campaign,

and he went to Chicago for the 1968 convention down there.

I felt it was important for me to be at Chicago,

just to show that I'd been present

when the convention was going down.

It was apparent from reading in the newspapers

that they were going to have the police out and

that these people were...

were going to react violently to any kind of a demonstration

that they might have down there.

I didn't want him to go down there.

What impressed me at the time was

the presence of the military.

They had snipers up on the Chicago Natural Museum,

they had machine gun placements on the bridges,

and then they had thousands of troops

surrounding the whole area,

plus thousands of Chicago police.

So we marched on the Conrad Hilton

where Humphrey was waving out the window at us.

And we'd just heard the news about Prague,

that the Soviets had invaded Czechoslovakia.

The repression that was used in Czechoslovakia was compared

to the repression being used in Chicago that day.

I was a delegate to the...

I was a delegate to the convention in Chicago.

There was, of course, lots of emotion, lots of fights.

Mr. Chairman, the state of West Virginia passes.

Wisconsin!

Mr. Chairman...

Most delegates to this convention do not know

that thousands of young people are being beaten

in the streets of Chicago.

[Delegates screaming]

And for that reason, and that reason alone,

I request the suspension of the rules

for the purpose of adjournment

for two weeks...

[Delegates yelling]

to relocate the convention in another city

of the choosing of the Democratic National Committee

and the presidential candidates...

Wisconsin is not acknowledged for that purpose!

[Delegates erupting]

I'm trying to state my statement, sir.

We want to relocate this convention...

Wyoming!

We got in front of the hotel and...

the whole demonstration was stopped for a two-block area.

And then we were blocked off at the other end by Chicago police.

And then up between the hotels,

the Blackstone Hotel and the Conrad Hilton came

some more cops

with TV cameras and so forth, so this was just after dark.

And the police marched up the street into our ranks.

And I told everybody around me to sit down and be arrested.

You know peacefully arrested.

I would say about a dozen people around me started sitting down.

Police came in and just started hitting people over the head.

I mean they weren't interested in arresting anybody.

Just hitting people and then dragging them off by the hair.

I remember seated right on the asphalt,

and trying to get up and people tripping over people,

and my face going into the asphalt.

[Crowd chaos, sirens wailing]

It was bedlam.

While I had my face in that asphalt,

and that split second, I said,

"I'm never going to be caught in a position like this again.

"If they're going to make war on us,

"we're going to make war on them."

Last night in Chicago, it was a pretty shameful affair.

Pretty shameful.

And they're only beginning and I think,

when the public gets through watching this battle of Chicago,

where they're really censoring the news

by the way they're handling the press,

the American people won't be willing

to turn over the leadership

of this country to that kind of a party for the next four years.

If you do become president,

would you consider using atomic weapons in Vietnam?

No...

I would not consider using atomic weapons in Vietnam,

and I'll go further.

I take a very firm line on Vietnam,

as you probably are aware.

But I would not use atomic weapons in Vietnam,

I would not invade North Vietnam,

and incidentally, I would not invade any of

the other countries in the area of Vietnam

for a fundamental reason.

The goal of the United States in Vietnam

must be to end this war in a way

that does not produce a bigger war or another war.

The American people are faced with...

a very unpleasant situation

that there is no liberal alternative anymore.

I spoke all over the state of Wisconsin on the campuses

to groups who were hostile to Hubert Humphrey.

There used to be a time when one could think

that one was a little more liberal than the other.

Mr. Humphrey represents what we have had.

You've got two choices I pointed out.

Your choice is Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon.

If you get Richard Nixon, you won't like it.

I didn't know how badly everyone would dislike it,

but I knew it would be bad.

Election night 1968

had to be one of the most depressing nights of my life.

Here we had Richard Nixon,

everyone knew he was lying through his teeth

about his secret peace plan, and he was elected.

He won in a squeaker.

All I could do was to go out,

it felt kind of futile,

but I went out with a lot of other people and

marched down State Street to protest this sham election.

By 1969, the Antiwar Movement, which arose out of the

Civil Rights Movement of the early '‘60s,

returned to its roots

in the form of a black student strike on campus.

Somebody in SDS got a call and we were asked...

"How many people can you get on the hill,

"on Bascom Hill tomorrow morning at noon?"

We said we thought we could get about 300 people.

They said, "Alright, you get them there

"because we're going to rip this motherfucker off."

"We're going to tear this motherfucker down."

The black students of the University of Wisconsin,

embodied in the black council,

have presented not one

but 13 demands to the university administration.

Our strategy was to make demands...

create a little ruckus,

and then try to get to the negotiating table and come out

with something concrete.

There was no discussion of a black studies program

before the strike.

The real issue is persuading reasonable people

that this university has a program...

It's carrying it on.

It's going to be a better program and a bigger program,

and that this university is going to go about its functions,

it's going to go about it

without being disrupted by anybody for any reason.

We are fighting for the liberation of minds!

Not the liberation of these pigs and racist society.

We're trying to save brothers and sisters,

from going to Vietnam.

I distinctly remember one very vivid image,

and that is of about 12 or 15 black guys,

all of whom were wearing combat boots

and green army fatigue jackets.

And I thought the revolution had arrived.

[Protesters chanting]

On strike, shut it down!

Tuesday afternoon, we rallied at the library mall,

the center of campus like we always did,

marched up the hill.

Along the march, a pink slip of paper

on which were printed maybe 20 words

was handed out to everybody.

The pink slip of paper merely said,

"This afternoon's tactics are obstructive picket lines.

"No one is to be allowed into the building."

So at that point,

they had completely upped the level of militancy.

As soon as that happened,

the National Guard was called in.

I will not in any way tolerate violence or disorder,

and in carrying out my duties,

I feel I have a direct responsibility

under the constitution

to call the National Guard when requested to do so.

People are tense on this university campus

and the troops coming in jeeps showing bayonets,

and coming armed and all the full paraphernalia of war,

have made many people tense.

And this is provocation.

The National Guard were ringed around the buildings,

there was no way that we could block the building

unless we did it on the points of their bayonets,

so we might as well block traffic, which is what we did.

And they kept on varying tactics like that

for 4 or 5 days,

which one, kept people involved,

and two, kept the administration guessing.

[Protesters] On strike, shut it down!

And you feel the use of the Guard was justified

under the circumstances?

Oh indeed I do,

particularly because it was to avoid violence.

[Protesters chanting]

On strike, shut it down! On strike, shut it down!

Racism was a very scary word for everybody...

You know, black students...

It was a tactic, it was a strategy that we did use

because it was necessary to cry racism,

because we got reactions when we did.

People would go from the strike to the dorms,

and they would talk about it.

They'd go to the bars and talk about it.

I also saw a consciousness being raised.

It's kind of hard to describe that.

One example would be doing the strikes,

just upgrading the tactics from demonstration to

destruction of property, maybe bombings and

just people's attitudes toward those types of things.

To up the level of militancy for the white students

meant mainly the question of violence.

The question of putting your body on the line,

and it became less a discussion or an essay

and more something that,

"Hey, I have to make a decision because I'm in SDS,

"and SDS is talking about this."

I don't think anybody gets real upset anymore

when they're called "a pig" or something like that.

That's part of the job.

The thing I keep uppermost or

runs through my mind naturally I guess is...

"Who is this fellow standing out here?

"Who is he to be calling me a pig?"

It's no secret that the police were called pigs.

And we didn't mind that so much.

So when we began the undercover operations,

I decided to name are officers that worked undercover

after breeds of hogs.

And it worked out very, very well.

They would sign their reports by a pig's name...

Duroc, Pullose, Peccary, Poland China.

The FBI around 1968, a year later,

instituted a grand master plan to

confuse and disrupt

the youth movement and the New Left.

I have here a copy of their master plan of July 5th, 1968,

which is a 12-point program to be undemocratic basically...

for the secret police to disrupt public conversation.

The sheriff's department had people working undercover.

The University Protection Security had people

working undercover.

So did the Department of Justice.

The FBI had someone and even military intelligence

was in the streets.

And we gelled all of it together.

"Consider the use of cartoons, photographs

"and anonymous letters

"which will have the effect of ridiculing the New Left.

"Ridicule is one of the most potent weapons

"we can use against it."

This is the secret police talking about the citizens.

This is the grand master plan of COINTELPRO 1968,

which was probably a response

to the relatively good-humored gathering together

of the confused citizenry

trying to figure out what to do with their government.

The lifestyle at that time was basically

revolved around political activity,

and people spent their time doing only a few things.

They'd go to school, do a little studying,

they'd spend a good deal of time with politics,

and then they had their social life.

And somehow on the side, they'd slip in work.

But all of these things were brought together,

the kind of work people would do,

the kind of social life,

all connected to the politics,

particularly to make sure one wasn't getting co-opted,

whether it was working in a bar or driving a cab.

I was living on Mifflin Street from the fall of 1967 on,

and that community sort of grew.

There were a few seedy ex-beatniks living there...

Then it became more of a sort of a hippie community.

The coop started. That was like this big impetus

for people moving into that neighborhood

to start to relate to their community.

I think people decided to have this block party

as a sort of celebration.

That didn't directly connect to the Antiwar Movement

or to anything else, but was a sort of community event.

♪ [Band playing, singing]

♪ We can be together

♪ Ah, you and me

♪ We should be together...

[Crowd yelling]

[Police screaming]

♪ We're all outlaws in the eyes of America...

Two other officers and I were the ones that were

at the beginning of the Mifflin Street riots

on May 3, 1969 at 512 West Mifflin Street.

They went out into the street, they were told

that they couldn't have their block party in the street.

And ones and twos and threes, people got arrested.

I got arrested just trying to drive my car down the street,

which was a bit of an irony because the police were supposed

to be there to keep the street open for traffic.

But even those during those first initial arrests,

there was still an attitude of levity and gaiety.

Mobs were in the streets at Mifflin and Bassett.

We tried to clear the streets.

As we cleared the streets,

we were pelted with rocks and bottles, cans...

We had to keep the streets open, we had to try to keep

the trouble down, but we couldn't,

so we had to resort to mechanical means to stop it.

And all I know is by the time I got bailed out of jail,

and went down there about 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock,

2-3 hours later,

it was like a war zone.

Clouds of tear gas,

the rubble, the barricades...

the bleeding, the rocks being thrown, the armored police...

The whole bit.

These are the examples of some of the articles that were

thrown at the policemen last night.

There were rocks, bricks...

This was taken off of one of the arrested people,

to give you an example of some of the attitudes

and actions of the dissidents

and their activities over last night and the night before.

What is the purpose of bringing these objects here

before the cameras?

To let the people see that this is not just all fun and games.

♪ [Drum roll]

The issue of the Army Math Research Center

was first raised in 1967 by people on the Cardinalstaff.

People were looking for war-related research on campus

and since that was funded by the army,

it was a logical first choice.

It was impossible to ignore.

They had it right on the front of the building.

"U.S. Army Math Research Center."

And what surprised me is it took so long

for the protests to materialize against the Center.

But the protests began against the Center

in the summer of 1969.

By the winter of 1969 resistance,

the Army Math Research Center was pretty strong.

I have to admit that that year, I couldn't understand how this

"abstract mathematics" was helping the army.

But the more and more we looked into it,

the more obvious it became that the Math Research Center

was doing abstractly what the military wanted.

The AMRC was doing no secret work,

no classified work for the campus.

And they were saying it was. I guess some chap named Rowen

or somebody like that around,

was making some charges in the Cardinal,

but it wasn't true.

At one point, I requested a copy of the 1967 Annual Report.

I was told that that report was never printed,

that they had not made annual reports until 1968.

So through Senator Proxmire's office,

we made the same request.

His office made the request to the army and

the army of course forwarded to a senator

a copy of the report and his office forwarded it to us.

It had a large section, and an 8-page section,

and it was only about a 40-page report,

censored out with a note saying,

"This material is is considered classified

"and not for public release."

But in the table of contents,

it listed what that section would've been,

and it simply said "Assistance to Project Michigan".

Along with some other researchers,

we delved into Project Michigan.

There'd been a lot of publicity about it

at the University of Michigan,

It was a project to use high-altitude,

infrared photography

to track heat-giving sources on the ground.

So we felt that there was quite a clear connection between

what the military was doing,

what the foreign policy of the country was,

what the Army Math Center was doing

and the university's complicity in permitting censored documents

to be published on its behalf.

The tension was building and building to a point

and all kinds of peaceful protests,

all kinds of peaceful discussions

about what AMRC was meant nothing

because the university and the army

were not going to give that up.

Jim Rowen seemed like had

a new article every day in The Daily Cardinal,

and it was something that I could really understand.

I could understand how that worked,

how it was that mathematicians did work

that caused deaths in Vietnam.

[Massive explosions]

I expected to go to college and sort of be involved in politics

and it would be fall

and I would be on this big college campus and

it wasn't like that...

Instead, it was meetings and meetings and

more meetings for long hours, late into the night.

And not going to classes.

It was like I felt like I had to catch up.

Everyone had these 4 years on me.

Here I was a freshman in college and had to catch up,

and somehow be this instant radical.

At that time, we were just one city in the country,

and it was going on all over the United States.

The notion of closing down a school to spend time

reflecting on the war, and learning about it,

and studying about it, and talking about it,

and sharing strategies

became a very good organizing device

and all of our energies went into pulling off

the October and November moratoriums.

The question of moratoriums, closing the university, came up

many times,

and my reaction was generally the same way...

That the purpose of a university is to educate people

and to help build a better world,

and closing it down isn't the way to do that.

Therefore, we would stay open as long as I could keep it open.

Part of our program is to bring home the relationship

of the university's compliance with the war machine.

For the day, we've scheduled pickets

at some university buildings that are closely connected

with the military industrial complex.

Our position is that ROTC and the Army Math Research Center

must be eliminated from the campus.

I'm wondering what your opinion is

on today's nationwide moratorium.

Very good.

You think it'll have an effect on policy?

I doubt that very much.

How about you, sir?

I don't know, the moratorium...

Gotta raise hell or else no one will recognize it.

So the more hell we raise, the more Nixon will find out.

I've had quite a few friends who have been killed over there

for what they're fighting for.

what these students and these people are doing,

I don't go for at all.

At the University Field House, they organized 15,000 people

into the moratorium and I was one of half-a-dozen speakers.

It is up to the people here tonight

to organize,

propose and enforce

a total moratorium

on military research and imperial investment

to begin here and now

a reversal of United States foreign policy.

[Audience applauding]

They carried David off that plane

in a canvas-covered box.

And the young officer stood guard

with a black band on his arm.

Inside that box was all that was left of my son,

a burned, broken body,

wrapped in plastic,

and covered with a uniform.

What did he die for?

What have over 40,000 other boys in Vietnam died for?

What have hundreds of thousands of soldiers,

Vietnamese soldiers,

women, peasants, even children...

What have they died for?

And what are thousands of other American boys

going to have to die for if we don't bring them home?

Merlin R. Allen, Bayfield.

Roscoe Ammerman, Madison.

Dale E. Anderson, New Lisbon.

Gerald R. Anderson, Kenosha.

Richard L. Anderson, Oshkosh.

♪ [Drums beating sadly]

The National Moratorium was the one thing that if ever

I had any doubts about

being involved in the Antiwar Movement,

that would've done it.

Carrying signs of people who had died

was an incredible feeling.

By the time you got to the White House,

that person was a part of you.

George Kilbuck.

William Hutton.

We dropped off the cards,

we were in a very somber mood, we left,

and then found out that

the President Nixon had not watched any of this,

that he was watching a football game at the time.

You can have 60,000 of us, or 250,000 of us,

parade in front of the White House or in DC,

and if Nixon makes a statement,

"I will not in any way be swayed by it,"

this is going to lead to frustration.

♪ [Rock music comes up]

♪ [Rock music fades out]

You know we came back from the war

and the environment here was real hostile,

especially to us.

People in the peace movement were down on us, you know.

People that were for the war were down on us.

I guess I gravitated toward Vets for Peace

as an organization in terms of formal involvement

in the Antiwar Movement at that point.

We had some credibility as guys who had been in Vietnam,

coming back and saying, "Hey, it's not working,

"they're lying to you, the light at the end of the tunnel

"ain't there folks."

Calley and My Lai and atrocities are not aberrations.

They're not unusual.

It's the day in, day out routine conduct of the war,

these kinds of things happen in Vietnam.

They are happening.

Alright, you ready to go?

You ready to go?

Every day you had to look at the war.

And as the war went on, every time you read the paper,

every time you saw the news, you saw not only

more and more scenes of violence in Vietnam,

the Vietnamese people being destroyed, but it became

a reality that maybe, to me,

that my sense of urgency grew

because I thought that maybe that country

would be completely obliterated

before the Vietnamese people could win.

[Sound of helicopter taking off]

Something concrete,

something specific, some blast,

some strike against the war machine as a machine,

needed to happen.

I can remember sitting in the basement of St. Frances House

in a Vets for Peace Meeting

where we were talking about more parades,

and more marches and so forth,

and thinking this isn't going to get us anywhere anymore.

We ought to be talking now about blowing up

railroad trains coming out of the Baraboo ammunition plant

where they're building this stuff, sending it to Vietnam.

If I'd had the courage to do what Armstrong did,

I would have.

I was just amazed, I came back and

a group called the New Year's Gang had bombed

the old red gym where the ROTC offices were.

I had a hard time concealing my glee that

the ROTC was getting what it had been producing.

It had been producing officers to fight in Vietnam,

and now they were getting some of that back.

I thought the New Year's Gang was a good idea

because it seemed to me like that was the only way

things were gonna be stopped.

The thing that really caught my imagination was

the fact that the New Year's Gang

had apparently rented a plane and

dropped the bomb on the Badger Munition Works.

Unfortunately it didn't go off.

We had B52s dropping bombs on Vietnam every day.

I felt that the psychological effect

of dropping a bomb on the Badger Ordinance plant

would be such that people would become...

Their imagination regarding struggle against the war

would be heightened.

[Protesters screaming]

[Bombs exploding]

[Jet roaring above]

[Siren sounding]

[More bombs blowing up]

The air war had just simply taken off

and intensified dramatically.

On campus, there was a greater sense of frustration every day.

It looked like the war was never going to end.

It was only getting worse.

And then Nixon invaded Cambodia.

Tonight, Americans and South Vietnamese units

will attack the headquarters for the entire communist

military operation in South Vietnam.

This key control center has been occupied

by the North Vietnamese and Vietcong

for 5 years in blatant violation

of Cambodia's neutrality.

[Protesters chanting]

Power to the people! Off the pig!

[Tear gas exploding]

[Panicked screaming]

The troops were formed in a circle

on the practice field next to Taylor.

They were shooting tear gas...

And it was orderly. No kids were out of hand.

And about 20 of them, the whole regiment,

lowered their guns and opened fire, straight fire.

Three people were dead on arrival at the hospital.

And one more died later.

Most of them were just plain gunned down

in cold blood in the back.

As soon as the students were shot at Kent State,

we knew that all hell was going to break loose.

And of course we knew it

when we called that first demonstration.

We stood up on the balcony there

and we looked down towards the Lakeshore dorms,

and Lakeshore path was black with people.

We looked up towards the Southeast dorms,

the Southeast dorms was black with people.

That first demonstration was like 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 people.

It was not just an explosion of rage.

I felt like people had a very concrete objective in mind,

and that was to try to get the U.S. government

to stop sending troops to Cambodia.

But that if the level of reaction in this country

was strong enough, that they would start to think

they couldn't afford

another Vietnam in Cambodia and it would stop.

And that was the objective.

There were hundreds, thousands in the streets at a time.

It was big.

We had to call up the Guard.

We coped as best as we could with the vandalism.

We had to use a considerable amount of gas.

We suppressed the violence as well as we could.

There was simply a riot for about 10 days,

the way I remember it.

Nobody went to classes.

Everybody was out into rallies, demonstrations,

and once it got dark,

there was trashing, looting, fire bombing.

I remember a cop going like this with his pistol

down on the edge of the car, using it as a rest.

I distinctly thought that he was going to shoot somebody.

I couldn't see that far up the street.

But I was right there, next to my friend, Lloyd Guzier.

We were both sitting there, we both had our guns,

we both put rounds into the chamber...

We just aimed.

Then the guy lifted his hand up and he walked away.

That cop never knew how lucky he was.

There were some people, the leaders,

said that we are at war with the state now.

And this is a position that they took,

and they were serious.

They would like to have overtaken

the city if they could.

I think there were a group of people

who saw themselves in a war.

I think we were isolated

from the mass feeling at the time,

which was to play war.

We thought that all those people would come right along with us.

I distinctly thought that.

I thought those people would rise to the occasion,

'cause you gotta remember, during Cambodia,

there were firebombings every night.

In one week's period of time,

there was 67 fire bombings in the city of Madison.

It was inconceivable

that we could turn this many people

out into the streets night after night,

take the campus apart...

And it wouldn't mean anything.

That it wouldn't in some way change the course of history.

[Gunfire]

Vietnam?

No.

Jackson State College in Mississippi.

When the students were killed at Jackson State,

there was not that much shock.

By 1970, we had expected the country to react differently

to the killing of black students

than they would to the killing of white students.

The white students were probably in shock at

the difference in reaction, but for us, we weren't really...

Martin Luther King had been killed...

So many things had happened that we just expected these things

and took them right into stride.

Really it's sad to say but true.

In the middle of the Cambodia aftermath,

I had received my reporting date for active duty on July 5th,

So I knew now that I had to make a decision pretty quickly,

and that decision really fell into place.

It was clear to me one alternative was out.

I was not gonna go to jail in Nixon's America.

Since 1966, when I was against the war,

not a single day passed when I had to deal with the fact,

what am I gonna do?

Do I have enough guts to do what I believe in

and not fight in Vietnam?

Or am I going to be just like all the liberals

who were advising me and that is,

"Put your beliefs in your back pocket,

"sit on them for two years, come out after the war

"and be a great American."

To me that was bullshit.

So I decided that what I had to do was

to opt for freedom and go to Canada.

The frustration that we felt with the...

If the war was to be ended at all,

there was only one way that was going to do it

and that was to make some big...

impact somewhere.

Whether it was going to be in Madison or not, we didn't know,

but something had to happen to stop the war.

[Earthshattering explosion]

It was about 4 o'clock in the morning,

an explosion went off, and I turned to my wife and I said,

"That's the Math Research Center."

That's the only thing it could be. It was obvious, right?

Something was gonna happen to that thing,

and when something blew up, it wasn't an accident.

That's what it had to be.

I was awakened at home when the bomb went off

that destroyed the Army Math Research Center and killed a

physics graduate student there.

Of course I immediately got up and came down,

and like everybody else, I was tremendously shocked by it.

I remember thinking, "Well, I'm not surprised"...

And that the university should have broken that contract

and gotten Army Math off the campus because that bombing

was an inevitability.

It was gonna happen at some point,

as long as the war continued.

We've got damage, serious damage

to millions of dollars worth of property

belonging to the people of the state of Wisconsin

and to the people of the United States of America.

In addition to that, of course we've got what appears to be

the beginnings of an outright revolution.

The UW Board of Regents today pledged a $100,000 reward

for any information which leads to the conviction

of those who bombed the Army Mathematics Research Center

at the Madison campus on Monday.

I couldn't believe any connection here at all.

There just wasn't any.

As a matter of fact,

even after the warrants were sworn out for him,

I couldn't believe that they were implicated.

I couldn't put anything together.

I had in mind that eventually we would give ourselves up,

and have a political trial.

We found out that a man had died in the bombing and

there was no way that we could give ourselves up for a trial.

I just felt that the bombing was very stupid at that time

because I knew that politically what had happened,

and I felt morally a sense of shame for taking someone's life.

I didn't feel it was justified.

The Karl Armstrong incident brings us back to

the Nuremberg trial and the whole problem of

who is responsible for the actions,

the criminal actions of a nation.

And it always boils down to the individual.

How do you respond personally to it?

If you feel truly responsible for it,

you have to act.

If you feel as responsible as Karl Armstrong,

you probably blow up a building.

An uneasy calm would probably best describe the mood here

at the University of Wisconsin

on this first day of the new school year.

On the surface, everything is quiet, but there is the memory

of the student disorders last spring

and the bombing last month

which left one person dead and four others injured.

Nobody's really sure what's gonna really go on right now.

There are various moods going around campus.

Some people really want to keep school going,

are anxious to have a good year, but

by and large, everything's up in the air.

I think that after bombing,

things pretty much disintegrated.

What the bombing did was that it changed the sort of

rock-throwing, comic strip type of revolution

that was going on

into a real revolution and told people

that people yes indeed were going to be hurt.

I don't think that the Antiwar Movement died.

I think that what happened was that

there was a lot of repression in this country which affected

the kinds of work that was going on.

And there was increasingly

new directions that political people were taking.

They were trying to move into communities that hadn't been...

That hadn't been touched by a lot of antiwar organizing,

and trying to talk about

whole new issues of life in this country.

We've dropped, as of five months ago,

23 million bombs on South Vietnam,

each one creating a crater 40 feet across and 25 feet deep.

We have left homeless 25% of South Vietnam,

which would be the equivalent of 50 million Americans homeless.

The cold hard fact of the matter is,

and I said it on the floor of the Senate 6 weeks ago, that

South Vietnam would be better off losing

to North Vietnam than winning with us.

How many more years do we have to go before

we can get out of Vietnam completely?

[Sen. William Proxmire] How long does this go on?

That war has gone on for 30 years.

And it'll be 10-15 years before we get out entirely?

I believe that that war

can continue for a good many more years.

With us in it?

Ladies and gentlemen, I am announcing today

the withdrawal of an additional 70,000 from Vietnam

over the next three months.

This means that our troop ceiling by May 1

will be down to 69,000.

What Nixon was able to do with the Vietnamization program

which was in effect when I, right before I went over,

and while I was there, was to...

It was a very shrewd tactic, I thought, and

accomplished the task of

starting to bring home U.S. GIs,

replace them with Vietnamese, so people didn't care if

Vietnamese were getting killed,

and escalate the air war to a great degree.

The death toll of American soldiers

was gonna drop off precipitously.

And, wow, they could keep on spending money and bombing,

which, of course, they ultimately did.

But the tragedy, of course, was that

people would buy it as a policy to continue the war.

[Rifles firing rounds]

For years, Memorial Day had been

kind of "America Right or Wrong,"

"Love it or Leave it" patriotic game.

♪ [Drums rolling]

Finally, the Antiwar Movement, the peace movement,

countered with a parade around the capital square,

which was quite separate.

I think it was like two hours after the first one was over.

It was entirely our own parade.

I think the incidence of GI reaction

and revulsion to the war

probably peaked along these periods.

The number of AWOLs and desertions,

the high incidence of fraggings,

the less-than-honorable discharge rates,

the drug abuse.

I think all these things could be seen at that point

as an indication of the breakdown of the army.

This is an honorable discharge, it says, from the Armed Forces of

the United States of America,

"This is to certify that Allen Wallace Morentz,

"Airman Second Class regular Air Force

"was honorably discharged from the United States Air Force

"on the 23rd day of May, December '66."

Down at the bottom, it says,

"This is an important record, safeguard it."

[Crowd cheers]

I pray that time will forgive me and my brothers for what we did.

♪ [Rock music comes up softly]

Second Battalion First Marines. Power to the people!

Twenty-second Cavalry strike in Da Nang.

I hope they realize this is their last goddamn chance.

Paul F. Willis. Spec four Army retired.

I've taking in 9 Purple Hearts, Distinguished Service Cross,

Silver Star, Bronze Star, Army commendation,

and a lot of other shit.

This is for my brothers!

Right on!

We don't want to fight anymore, but if we have to fight again,

- it'll be to take these steps. - Right on!

[Crowd cheers]

All power to people!

You came here to testify for Karleton Armstrong?

I did.

I was asked by Mr. Kunstler to come and testify.

OK, why did you do this?

Well, I have felt, while I have not prepared to pass judgment

on this particular offense,

I think that all protest against the war,

not only justified but a civic duty.

I think after you appreciate how we were lied into this war,

and the terrible consequences of it...

Just think, as a result of Johnson's lying,

55,000 American boys are dead.

And I think that it's the duty of every American,

if he knows these facts, to protest.

And Armstrong was one of those protestors.

Armstrong had gone and made a decision,

gotten involved in blowing up a building,

and everything was gonna come down on him.

It wasn't going to come down on the rest

of the Antiwar Movement.

He was a product of that Antiwar Movement,

whether he was right or wrong.

[Prison door slams shut]

In full coordination with the Republic of Vietnam,

I have ordered the following measures

which are being implemented as I am speaking to you.

All entrances to North Vietnamese ports

will be mined to prevent access to these ports

and North Vietnamese naval operations from these ports.

Rail and all other communications

will be cut off to the maximum extent possible.

Air and naval strikes

against military targets in North Vietnam will continue.

And finally, may I say to the American people...

I ask you for the same strong support you've always given

your president in difficult moments.

It is you, most of all,

that the world will be watching.

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh!

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh! The N.L.F. is gonna win!

[President Richard Nixon] You want peace.

I want peace.

[Explosions, sirens sounding]

♪ [Oriental music]

If I'd known some of the things that Karl knew,

I probably would have been very active

in the Antiwar Movement.

But I didn't know some of the things.

A lot of those things were by word of mouth and...

And of course I have a tendency like a lot of older people do

to take and believe that your children sometimes

exaggerate the situations.

And of course they weren't exaggerating.

They were telling us the truth and we weren't listening.

♪ We should be together

♪ Come on all you people standin' round

♪ Our life's too fine to let it die

♪ We should be together

♪ C'mon now together

♪ Get it all together

♪ Everybody together

♪ We should be together

♪ We should be together, my friends

♪ We should be together

♪ We can be

♪ We must begin here and now

♪ A new continent of love and fire

♪ Tear down the walls

♪ Tear down the walls

♪ Tear down the walls

♪ Tear down the walls

♪ Tear down the walls

♪ Won't you try?

Captioning: Mistral Artist-New York