The Family (31 page)

The day before the march on the Pentagon, October 20, 1967, Coffin arrived in Washington accompanied by 250 antiwar protesters, including America’s beloved pediatrician Benjamin Spock, the writer Norman Mailer, and the poet Robert Lowell. The potent mix of religion, fame, and Ivy League prestige drew mass-media coverage to their staged drama on the steps of the Justice Department. Before going inside to deliver a bag containing 994 draft cards collected at antiwar rallies that week, Coffin made a speech.

“We cannot shield them,” he said. “We can only expose ourselves as they have done. We hereby counsel these young men to continue in their refusal to serve in the armed forces as long as the war in Vietnam continues, and we pledge ourselves to aid and abet them in all the ways we can. This means that if they are now arrested for failing to comply with a law that violates their consciences, we, too, must be arrested for in the sight of the law we are now as guilty as they.”

To their disappointment Coffin and the men with him were not arrested, which unsettled their critics, including Kingman Brewster Jr., the president of Yale. Besieged by calls from outraged alumni, Brewster addressed the controversy kicked up by his chaplain at Yale’s Parents Day Assembly a week later. He read a letter written by a freshman to the
Yale Daily News
that he felt represented the majority of the student body:

Such a drastic choice as civil disobedience must be an individual one, as one suffers the consequences alone. One cannot allow himself to be sucked into the frenzy of a mass sign-in. One must be absolutely sure that he is not only opposed to the War in principle but is also willing to suffer years of imprisonment, a certain degree of public shame, and a specter that will follow him until he dies . . .

I truly admire those who are fortunate enough to have made up their minds as to how far they are willing to carry their dissent, or their approval. But I defend my right to be undecided—to carry my indecision right up to the day of my induction, if necessary. I will not sign an agreement, which I do not intend to carry out.

Yale’s president made clear his disapproval of the chaplain’s pronouncements and actions, but then he said:

Would Yale be a better place if the Chaplain were not free to pursue his own convictions, including the preaching and practice of non-violent disobedience of a law he feels he could not in conscience obey? I think not . . . Even though I disagree with the Chaplain’s position on draft resistance, and in this instance deplore his style, I feel that the quality of the Yale educational experience and the Yale atmosphere has gained greatly from his presence . . . his personal verve and social action . . . So I not only find it easy to condone what I disapprove . . . but I am also sure that your sons will look back upon Yale in 1967 as a better place to have lived and learned because of the controversies, including the draft resistance controversy, which so tax the patience of so many of their elders.

The Old Blues rose up in arms. Within twenty-four hours George got a letter from his Uncle Herbie (Yale 1927), who had received the Yale Medal, the highest award of the Yale Alumni Board, for raising over $2 million for his alma mater:

Just so you will be completely up to date on the Coffin affair. I am sending you the full release that was given out in New Haven Saturday on Brewster’s statement . . . I don’t know how you feel about it, but most of us here think Brewster’s statement leaves
much
to be desired.

Jonathan Bush (Yale 1953), who was working for G. H. Walker and Company, registered his disapproval in a letter to Kingman Brewster:

I agree with you that Yale is more important to the country than ever and that Yale is in effect training tomorrow’s leaders. I do not like to think that tomorrow’s leaders are being influenced by unpatriotic acts on the part of the university faculty.

I am sure you have received many complaints about William Coffin. I do not want to belabor the subject but I wish to add my protest also. Every time his name is mentioned in the paper, that of Yale is mentioned with him. I believe that is sad for our great institution.

George, too, was irate. He fired off a letter on his congressional stationery to the executive secretary of the Yale Development Board about Brewster’s speech. “The first part [disapproving of the chaplain] I liked,” he wrote. “The second part [defending the chaplain] I didn’t.” That was basically the extent of his analysis and the extent of his attempt to understand Brewster’s defense of his chaplain’s right to freedom of speech.

In a letter to a Houston constituent, George wrote:

The case of Reverend Coffin troubles me very much. I have discussed it with the Justice Department and as a member of the Yale Development Board, I am planning to protest to the President of Yale this weekend. The Justice Department simply tells me that they are “studying the matter” and also that they are waiting for a Supreme Court decision on the whole question of draft cards very soon. You are absolutely right about the lack of law enforcement in this area, and I have protested and will continue to protest. Those who stormed the Pentagon and deliberately broke the law were given minimal fines and for all intent and purposes were turned loose. This was totally wrong.

Getting no satisfaction from the Justice Department, George turned to the House Un-American Activities Committee, notorious for Communist witch-hunting, and received a three-page report dated November 7, 1967, on Dr. Benjamin Spock. Years later George stipulated that the HUAC report—which he included with the papers he donated to his presidential library—be sealed.

When he arrived in New Haven for Yale’s board meeting, George came armed with legal research showing that Coffin may have violated a statute of the District of Columbia code pertaining to selective service, which would also put him in violation of the U.S. Criminal Code. George reported back to his Houston constituent: “I did have a talk with Yale’s President Kingman Brewster. In fact, it turned out to be a full-scale debate with him before 80 members of the Yale Development Board.”

A “full-scale debate” is a rather inflated description of the one respectful question George posed, later acknowledged by Yale’s director of operations and development:

It was a great treat for us to have you with us. Everyone around here is still talking about your superb question from the floor about civil disobedience and the Chaplain. In bringing up the subject in the way you did you made a significant contribution to the success of the whole weekend and for that we are most appreciative.

Continuing his vendetta against Yale’s chaplain, George wrote to another constituent. He described the fifty thousand people who marched on the Pentagon as a “pitiful demonstration”:

As a Yale graduate and a member of the Yale Development Board, I have protested these actions . . . The Justice Department tells me they are not sure Coffin has violated the law, but I have two specific references which I am confident he has violated. It is a disgrace to my University and, more important, to our country. I will do what I can.

Mounting pressure finally forced the Justice Department to act. The FBI arrested Spock and Coffin with three other activists for receiving draft cards from those who refused to serve in Vietnam. Known as “the Boston Five,” the men were indicted for conspiracy to aid and abet draft resistance, a felony for which, if convicted, they could receive ten years in prison and be fined ten thousand dollars. Their trial in Boston, which came to be known as “the Spock Trial,” began May 20, 1968, at the height of the war.

Bracketed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King (April 4, 1968) and Robert F. Kennedy (June 6, 1968), the trial focused on the concept of civil disobedience, in particular on those protesters who believed that the massacre of the Vietnamese was an absolute evil. Yet the court barred all testimony that questioned the legality of the Vietnam War, and the moral point of the protesters was overshadowed by the continuing escalation of the war itself. In the end, four of the five men were found guilty, including Spock and Coffin, and sentenced to two years in prison. They appealed and the convictions were overturned in 1969. The government did not take further action. Faculty and students at Yale paid more than half of Coffin’s legal fees.

As his university was being battered like a ship in the winds of a hurricane, George Walker Bush, a senior in 1967, made his debut in
The New York Times
. While the father was defending his country’s right to bomb Southeast Asia, the son was defending his fraternity’s right to “brand” its pledges.

“It’s only a cigarette burn,” George W. said. “There’s no scarring mark physically or mentally.”

Triggered by an exposé in the
Yale Daily News
about fraternity hazing, accusations arose that George’s fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon, engaged in “sadistic and obscene” initiation procedures. “The charge that has caused the most controversy on the Yale campus is that DKE applied a ‘hot branding iron’ to the small of the back of its 40 new members,” reported
The New York Times
.

“I can’t understand how the authors of [that] article can assume that Yale has to be so haughty not to allow this type of pledging to go on at Yale,” said George. As the fraternity’s former president, he said the branding was done with a hot coat hanger. “It’s insignificant,” he said. “Totally insignificant.” He claimed Yale’s fraternities had the least severe initiations in the country, adding that Texas fraternities used cattle prods.

In the twelfth cycle of the Vietnamese calendar, 1967 was the Year of the Goat, but for Americans it was the year of death. More U.S. soldiers died in combat that year than in all the war’s previous years. By the end of 1967, more than 480,000 American troops had been sent to Southeast Asia, more than in the Korean War at its peak. Already American involvement in the Vietnam War had lasted longer than in World War II, and the weekly bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam had exceeded that of all the World War II tonnage dropped on Germany. Antiwar demonstrations in the United States, once filled with long-haired lefties out of the antinuke movement, became more mainstream as the middle-class mothers of the ten thousand expatriates who had fled to Canada took to the streets. In December 1967, President Johnson announced a traditional Christmas cease-fire and grounded the B-52s while he visited the troops in Cam Ranh Bay.

Congressman George Bush also took advantage of the lull to visit Southeast Asia. He left Houston the day after Christmas for sixteen days in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Upon his return, he issued a statement of rah-rah optimism, expressing “an overwhelming sense of pride in my country.” He did not realize that he had been bamboozled by the military promise of “light at the end of the tunnel.” Nor did he recognize the trap of open-ended conflict that would ensnare even more American troops. Rather, he reported “in every aspect of the war—political, economic and military—I saw or heard evidence of progress.” He urged patience on the part of the United States. “The losses the enemy is taking are heavy, and the Viet Cong are gradually losing their grip on the people in the countryside. These factors will ultimately force them to quit.”

Two weeks later the enemy that was supposedly “losing their grip” launched an offensive during Tet, the Buddhist lunar holiday. With more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese troops, they attacked every major city and most of the provincial capitals. The Vietcong had now pushed the battle from the jungles to the cities, and though they suffered huge losses, they gained a psychological and political victory with the element of surprise. The Tet Offensive turned the American attitude toward the war, especially after the respected CBS newsman Walter Cronkite reported on his trip to view the aftermath of the attacks.

Highly critical of U.S. officials, Cronkite contradicted official statements on the war’s progress. He criticized American leaders for their foolish optimism and advised immediate negotiation, “not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” (Negotiations would start and stop until the Paris Peace Accords went into effect in January 1973, and U.S. troops were withdrawn. South Vietnam soldiered on until Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975 and the country was reunited. The loss of American lives exceeded fifty-eight thousand.)

On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. “If I’ve lost Walter Cronkite,” the President confided to friends, “I’ve lost the country.”

The President was pushed to his decision by Democratic Senator Eugene J. McCarthy of Minnesota, who stunned the country by nearly toppling the President in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy’s showing (41 percent to 49 percent for LBJ) was considered an enormous victory for the antiwar movement.

“When Johnson made the announcement that he was not going to run for President,” recalled Mark Soler (Yale 1968), “the bells of Harkness Tower, the main carillon on campus, started ringing. There was incredible jubilation all over.”

The country’s view might have been changing, but George Herbert Walker Bush remained stubbornly committed to the war, even when family and friends tried to dissuade him. As early as 1954 his father had opposed sending “ground troops into the swamplands of Indochina.” Prescott had said then, “If our military support is needed over there, I believe it should be limited to sea and air forces.” Ten years later he said that escalation of the war had lost the United States the good opinion of the world.

“There’s hardly any section of the world . . . which is enthusiastically behind our position in Southeast Asia . . . and this hurts. This makes it more difficult for the President to implement his policy . . . It’s a lot more comfortable to have world opinion with you on any major foreign policy issue than it is to be suspect, or to enjoy the disapproval of a large section of [the] world.”