Interview 3
April 27, 2000

Professor John Chatfield, History Department, Trinity College

To what extent were you involved in student protest?

 Well, I was involved in the civil rights moment in the early sixties with a student nonviolent coordinating committee.  I served for nine months in Southern Georgia in a voter registration project.  That really defines the parameters of my activity in organized protest.   I came back from the South in the spring of ’63 and resumed my Trinity career and then graduated in ’65.  Before the war began to heat up, my friends and I had doubts about the war, questions about the war.  In contrast to some I was not involved in highly organized protest with the exception of involvement during the summer of ’66 in New York.  I was a graduate student of Columbia at that time and I was involved in a project called Vietnam Summer, which simply enlisted a group of students who would try to organize meetings and talk about Vietnam with an eye toward encouraging people to protest against the war.  For the sake of this interview, it is important to know that I was not a member of Students for Democratic Society or any of the antiwar organizations.  I was simply an interested person who followed the war very closely and who had increasingly strong doubts about it.  But I was at Columbia during these years, beginning in the fall of ’65 and extending through the end of the decade, ’69.  So I was on a university campus when protest movements began to mount.  I saw many things at Columbia.  I was witness to them even if it had just been to a degree. 

I did attend the Pentagon march in October of 1967.  I went down to Washington with a friend of mine.  I went to at least one more Washington march; I think it was in ’69.  I may have gone to a third but I remember two very clearly, in ’67 and ’69.  I was at Columbia in the spring of ’68 when the campus was seized by antiwar radicals.  The campus was actually seized and held for a space of weeks during April and May of 1968 and I was there during that but I was not involved in occupying the building.  I also attended an antiwar march in Central Park, I forgot to mention that, during the spring of ’67 and witnessed the burning of draft cards but decided not to burn my own.  I cheered at the speeches and thought of the efforts of those who were there.  So my antiwar activity was far from being consuming or deep.  It was simply defined by marches, protests, what have you.  Some students during the ‘60’s actually made antiwar protest a vocation.  They formed committees, organized for months at a time.  Organized mass marches, or moratoria, as they were called.  In fact, on of the headquarters of the antiwar movement was at Union Theological Seminary, which was in right in the same neighborhood as Columbia was, and I brushed up against these guys, saw them all the time, what have you, but I simply was not threatened at all. 

Although you were not directly involved, could you describe the intensity you witnessed at these protests?

 First of all, in my circle of friends we carried on elaborate conversations and arguments about the war.   We were all against the war but for perhaps different reasons, what have you, degrees of anti-Communism, and the like.  I was actually, in the mid sixties, I was and remain today, a staunch and unbending foe of Communism, which I view as a system which is a kin to fascism, not the worst of fascism.  Not every communist system is genocidal, of course Stalinist Russia was.  It is important for me to say, especially on a college campus today, that I view communist totalitarianism as a despotic socio-political system, and for that reason I found it very hard to identify with the enemies of the United States and Vietnam.  So my opposition to the war was very much based upon a sense that this was not a war we should get involved in.  It was a feudal war, perhaps a virtually endless war, that we were making war upon a civilian population; I had all kinds of strong feelings about the war.  In contrast with some antiwar radicals, I never identified with the Vietcong, or the North Vietnamese regime.  That distinguished me from some of my colleagues, some that I knew well, and that that I didn’t know very well.  The intensity was everywhere in those days, beginning in especially in 1966.  Surprisingly, it tended to grow rather rapidly and then subside.  I can tell you a story which I still remember rather vividly.   At Columbia, there was virtually no antiwar activity until sometime, I believe the year was 1966, when three young people, all of them members of the Trotskyite Socialist Worker’s Party, began to hand out pamphlets on the campus.  The appearance of those three students was the foreshadowing of what became a more massive and powerful movement.  But the fact that these folks only appeared in 1966, that their numbers where small, they were literally three who introduced antiwar pamphlets to the Campus.  This is a sign that college campuses are relatively quiescent, but that changed very rapidly in the next couple of years.  The various marches were electrifying events.  At the Pentagon march of 1967 there were countless numbers, outside the Pentagon there were airborne troops holding rifles, wearing gasmasks, demonstrators taunting soldiers.   In fact in one of the most dramatic moments I ever had in my life, I actually stopped a young woman from taunting one of the soldiers who was guarding the Pentagon.  I took the flower out of her hand and said, “don’t harass that soldier.”   She turned to me and said, “which fucking side are you on?”  There was a lovely argument about the war, which I still remember as signifying the depth of our democratic culture.  By and large people were polite and restrained, they sat or stood, they didn’t make any effort of course to break the line of the soldiers.  Apart from this young woman who was jamming a flower up the nose of this statuesque man, the demonstrators were actually rather civil and even respectful of the soldiers.  That impressed me quite deeply because later on in the decade the animosities were so great that soldiers might have been pilloried and pelted with one missal or another. 

The most intense experience of course that I had was on the Columbia campus in the spring of ’68.  There were a number of grievances which the campus chapter of the Students for Democratic Society had against Columbia.  Some of them involved support for military research and others involved neighborhood issues.  In April of ’68, a small number of radicals decided to occupy one of the administrative buildings and they moved in with force, at a time when the building was empty, and managed to occupy the president’s office, and other offices.  Other radicals joined them and occupied a number of the academic buildings on campus so that after two or three days, perhaps even after a full day, virtually the entire campus had been shut down.  The building where most of the graduate history classes were held was completely occupied and barricaded.   My friends and I crawled in through a window and listened to some of the debates one day and they were interesting to listen to.   I was not a participant and I was very much opposed to this action and I began to see that I didn’t share some of the sentiments of the men and women who had done this.  I happened to be there with some friends at about two or two-thirty am, when suddenly the police appeared and they poured out of vans, and headed for the occupied buildings.   In fact, one of the cops struck me because I seemed to be moving too slowly as he moved us across a field in the middle of campus.   At that point the police used force to empty the buildings and it was quite a scene to see. 

It may interest you to know that one of the young men who I heard speak during that spring of 1968 was a young student, a senior I believe, named Ted Gold.  I heard him speak and I was very impressed.  He was very plainspoken and forceful and persuasive in the points that he raised.  This was 1968.  In the spring of 1970, a very posh townhouse in lower Manhattan suddenly blew up.  When the explosion occurred, there was an article in the New York Times that reported the explosion and surmised that a gas line had exploded in the apartment building.  Within a short space of time, two or three bodies were found inside the apartment building.  IN a very short space of time, it became clear that the explosion had not been caused by an exploding gas line, but by a bomb.  The apartment building turned out to have been a bomb factory being operated by one of the radical groups, called the Weathermen, and one of the students killed was Ted Gold who I had seen as Columbia.  If you know anything about the late 60’s and 70’s, you know that there was a progressive kind of radicalization among some of these groups and one of the consequences was that some students decided to use revolutionary techniques including revolutionary violence as a tool against the oppressive American system. 

I was a very ardent foe of Communism as a system of despotism, but by and large, student protesters who emerged during the 60’s, were not guided by that kind of sentiment in the way that I was and the way that other people were.  If anything, the antiwar protesters, broadly speaking, were less hostile to Communism than earlier generations had been and they were inclined to be much more sympathetic to the guerilla movement that emerged as a insurgent force in Vietnam.  The question of Communism and anti-Communism is an extremely interesting one.  I am inclined to think, and I feel strongly about this, that most of the opposition to the Vietnam War, or at least the nature of the opposition, was less and less guided by anti-Communism and more and more sympathetic to the cause of the NLF and the Vietcong on the very plausible grounds that this was a revolutionary movement that had been organized against a repressive regime, that is the South Vietnamese government, the government we were supporting and protecting in Vietnam.  I was inclined to believe that the South Vietnamese government was very oppressive, but was equally inclined to be very suspicious of and very critical and very hostile to any political movements that were in the control of Communists.  I don’t think these sentiments were widespread within the antiwar movement. 

So you would say Communism was no longer the threat it had been earlier, especially during McCarthyism? 

 I did not view Communism in Vietnam as being a threat to the United States.  I viewed the Soviet Union as being hostile, but not imposing a great danger to the security of the United States.  The question of whether Communism is a threat, that’s one question.  I shared the feelings of millions of my countrymen, both young and old, that Communism especially in Vietnam posed no threat to the security of the United States, and if Communism conquered the South, it would be an event that would not injure the interests of the United States anywhere in the world.  The question of whether Communism posed a threat to the United States, that’s one very distinct question.  The question of whether Communism is a benevolent social system is a separate question and many of the antiwar protesters came to believe that Communism was a system that served the needs of the poor and oppressed.  That guerilla insurgencies that were controlled by Communists were insurgencies that were inevitable responses to repressive systems, and they had come to believe that the Communists in Vietnam represented the better alternative, perhaps even an alternative that out to be praised and celebrated.  Again, within the antiwar movement there was a whole spectrum of opinions, and I hope I am not simplifying or distorting this, but I think during the course of the sixties, within the broad ranks of the antiwar movement, there was more and more sympathy for the North Vietnamese, for the guerillas in the South, for the insurgence in the South, and the sympathy was I think intensified or heightened by the way in which the United States was waging war against this poor and relatively primitive economy, in the Far East. 

How were foreign leaders such as Ho Chi Minh viewed by the majority of protesters? 

 I think increasingly, during the late 60’s and early 70’s, Ho Chi Minh was viewed as a national hero and someone who ought not to have been our enemy, in part because he posed no threat to America, and in part because he was the great hero of the revolution, who had expelled the French form Indochina, and was not waging heroic war against the Americans.  If anything, Ho Chi Minh became a hero among many of those in the ranks of the antiwar movement.  What I’m really saying is that during this period of time, the late 60’s and early 70’s, many Americans who were young, and others who were old, but mostly those who were young, began to believe that these great Communists warriors were great heroes of mankind waging righteous war against unrighteous enemies, whether in the Western Hemisphere or in the Far East. 

How did the majority of protesters view U.S. leaders such as President Johnson and Nixon?

 They were viewed increasingly not only as misguided but as war criminals.  One of the antiwar chants that I heard over and over again was hey hey L.B.J, how many kids have you killed today?  One of the other chants that I heard was Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the Vietcong is going to win!  In ’65 or ’66 it might have been commonplace to condemn America for making an error or rushing into a war or making a commitment that it ought not to have made.  With the intensifying movement, with the intensifying war, with the air war and what have you, and the massive introduction of American troops, Johnson, McNamara, and others really came to be viewed as war criminals; men who had committed crimes against humanity.