They Marched Into Sunlight (74 page)

One of the first letters to arrive was a handwritten note on the stationery of Harry Charles Thoma of 4182 Nakoma Road in Madison. “Dear Chancellor,” it read. “As an alumnus, a taxpayer, a retired Army officer and father of a son killed in action in Viet Nam I back your stand 100%. Keep it up. Let’s hope you get more support in the months ahead. Dissent is a right, but lawlessness and violence cannot and must not be tolerated.”

Here, in one note, was an unlikely thread connecting the disparate worlds of war and peace. Harry Thoma’s son, Major Charles J. Thoma, had been not only a soldier in Vietnam, but an officer in the Second Battalion, Twenty-eighth Infantry, First Infantry Division. He had been a Black Lion, serving as the battalion operations officer, the same S-3 job later held by Terry Allen Jr. and Big Jim Shelton. On January 12, 1967—ancient history, long, long ago in the war, more than a month before Allen arrived in Vietnam, six months before the C Packet soldiers on the USNS
Pope
got there—Thoma was with the Black Lions on a search- and-destroy mission in the jungle northwest of Saigon, part of the massive Operation Cedar Falls. That day they had found a Viet Cong munitions cache, several hundred tons of rice, and miscellaneous enemy documents. At two twenty in the afternoon, Thoma was shot in the head by a sniper. He died hours later in surgery, at age thirty. He was, as it happened, the first Black Lions officer to die in battle in Vietnam in 1967, and Terry Allen Jr. was the last.

The turmoil at the campus end of State Street consumed the Wisconsin legislature that day. Since Republicans controlled the governor’s office, the Assembly, and the Senate, the argument was largely between mainstream conservatives and hard-line right-wingers. In some ways it was a mirror image of the fissure between liberals and leftist radicals on the antiwar side, though with less apparent bad blood. Senator Roseleip was on the loose, pushing for an academic coup d’etat in which state lawmakers would seize operational control of the university, or at least, as a fallback position, make sure that two leftist student organizations, SDS and the W. E. B. DuBois Society, were banned from campus. These groups, Roseleip said, were nothing more than “tools of the Communists.” It was left to Jerris Leonard, the Senate majority leader, a moderate conservative from the suburbs of Milwaukee, to keep Roseleip under control.

Leonard had ambitions beyond the state legislature. Preparing to challenge Gaylord Nelson for a Senate seat the following year, he had been recruited by the state of Wisconsin’s Wall Street bond lawyer, John Mitchell, to chair the state campaign of Mitchell’s law partner and political friend, Richard M. Nixon, the former vice president, who wanted to run in the 1968 presidential primary. Before he could move on to those political pursuits, Leonard had to deal with the problems at the university. At the time of the Dow protest he was feuding with President Harrington over construction budgets and tax breaks for private schools, a political fight colored by personal animosity. Harrington was not a particularly beloved figure among state Republicans. They considered him an imperious academic who barely deigned to deal with elected pols, and they loved to point out that he rode in a chauffeured black Cadillac while Governor Knowles used a Rambler built by American Motors in Kenosha. Leonard’s distaste for Harrington only increased when word got back to him that the UW president, at a party in Madison, reportedly had declared, “We’ve got to destroy this guy Leonard.”

But there were other factors shaping Leonard’s perspective now. Much like Knowles, whose agenda he advanced in the legislature, he wanted to get tough with protesters without disabling the university, which was vital to the economic health of the state, particularly rural areas that relied heavily on the ag school and tended to be represented by Republicans. Furthermore he had come to believe that most student demonstrators were “venting their testosterone” and were not serious threats to the established order. And finally, he had learned a lesson already concerning reckless rhetoric. After an earlier episode on campus, he had criticized the
Daily Cardinal
for employing an editor who happened to room with the son of a Communist Party figure. He had “taken a ration of shit” for that attack and come to regret it as an unfortunate case of guilt by association. All of those things went into Jerris Leonard’s reasoning as he took on Senator Roseleip at the Capitol that October Friday.

“You don’t outlaw organizations no matter how much you disagree with them,” Leonard told Roseleip during the Senate debate. “Everybody has a right to his point of view, even the screwballs in the DuBois Society. Unless you give a method of expression to every point of view in a democracy, you will have riots on the street corners.”

“Don’t you think this is a conspiracy?” Roseleip thundered back.

“Nobody makes a conspiracy with words,” Leonard responded.

In an effort to “cut off hysteria from the right,” Leonard and the governor’s political team came up with the idea of launching a bipartisan Senate investigation of the Dow incident. The scope of the investigation would be limited to the protest and ways that violent confrontations might be averted in the future. They would stack the committee with moderates and have Jack Olson, the lieutenant governor, serve as chairman. Olson did not want the job but had no choice; Leonard and Knowles considered him mild to the point of boring, just what they wanted. The wording of the resolution was anything but judicious. Blame was already fully assigned as the committee was instructed to gather facts on “the riotous and unlawful activities” of students during the Dow demonstration.

The prospect of an investigation excited Roseleip and his cohorts. “This thing has been swept under the rug too long,” said Gerald Lorge of Bear Creek, in support of the legislative inquest. “When you pick up the paper and see the American flag torn down, when people are fighting and dying and being maimed in Vietnam, I think this”—the Dow demonstration—“is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever heard of.”

For the second straight day Madisonians were picking up the paper and seeing the flag torn down. The
Wisconsin State Journal
devoted nearly half of its Page of Opinion to a Pictorial Editorial headlined “All This Must Go.”

What must go? Three things. The first was “Outside ‘Help’ from San Francisco,” rendered in this case by a small photograph of Miss Sifting and Winnowing, under the mistaken assumption that the whiteface mime was a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe rather than Wisconsin’s own Vicki Gabriner. The second thing that had to go was Robert Cohen, who was pictured speaking into a battery-powered bullhorn next to the cutline, “A Teaching Assistant Gives Foghorn Leadership.” And the third thing that had to go was the flag cutter, caught in the act atop Bascom Hall again in Norm Lenburg’s photograph, this time displayed in four columns.

District Attorney Jim Boll was sitting in his office that afternoon when the phone rang; he picked it up and a male voice said, “I fought in World War II and I was severely wounded and I love the flag. Will you do what you can to apprehend the person who tore down the American flag and desecrated it?” The man had seen the picture, twice, in the paper, and was incensed that the culprit had not been caught. The picture had infuriated Boll too, and now he felt compelled to act. He could laugh it off when a raging young woman protester had shrieked at him, “Boll, you suck cock!” And it was disturbing, but not enough to rouse his prosecutorial fervor, when someone—obviously not an admirer—had slipped into his office the night before and left a white chicken in his chair with a swastika painted on it, and next to the chicken a swastika-decorated egg. Boll didn’t consider himself a fascist; he thought of himself as someone who was enforcing the law. He gave the chicken to a janitor, who ate it.

Boll was an officer in the National Guard and his father had fought in the trenches in World War I, and every year at eleven on the morning of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, Veterans Day, no matter what he was doing, he would stand up and turn to the east and pray to honor the war dead. Once, a few years before the Dow protest, he had performed this annual ritual in the courtroom during the trial of antiwar demonstrators who had been arrested for blocking a highway near Truax Field, the local air base. His nation’s symbols were deeply felt by Jim Boll. People could insult him but not the flag.

In his pursuit of the flag cutter, Boll teamed with Vernon (Jack) Leslie, the Dane County undersheriff, a former marine who had fought in the Pacific in World War II and who carried a palpable hatred for the long-hairs who now challenged authority and opposed the war in Vietnam. They were an unlikely duo, the prosecutor and the sheriff: Boll be spectacled and mild-mannered, Leslie a hard-drinking gamecock of a lawman who strutted through town with a menacing air. Whenever protesters landed in the county lockup, it was Leslie who gleefully ordered their long hair shorn, and in his own private manipulation he recruited a jailed rapist to be the barber. Boll, in describing Leslie, often told the story of the time they were preparing for another antiwar demonstration. Leslie had heard students chanting “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” and decided that he could not tolerate the use of the word “fuck” in that context, so he instructed his troops to arrest anyone who said it.

“Jack, you can’t go arresting people for that,” Boll cautioned him.

To which Leslie barked, “Why the fuck can’t we?”

Leslie and his men had been called in late, as a backup force, and had missed the Dow confrontation, and although Boll was among those who privately felt that the undersheriff’s absence was probably for the best, it had left Leslie unfulfilled. He was eager to bring the protesters into line. If he could not crack unruly heads inside Commerce, at least he could haul in the kid who had cut down the American flag. With the Lenburg photo circulating for a second straight day, Boll and Leslie had received enough tips to have the name of a prime suspect, a student named Stielstra. The problem was which Stielstra? Phil or Jonathan? The search was on.

Detective Tom McCarthy returned to police headquarters for a few minutes that afternoon of the twentieth. Bandages protected his nose after surgery at Madison General Hospital, the first of many operations on his sinus passages, which had been permanently damaged. His injury had been reported in the papers, eliciting a stack of letters, get-well cards, and telephone messages. Strangers offered him a free trip to LasVegas, and a group of lawyers wanted to pay his membership in a downtown athletic club. Jack Olson, the lieutenant governor, wrote to say that he felt “more secure knowing our peace officers are equal to any occasion.”

Nine professors from the UW chemistry department signed a letter to McCarthy saying they “regret terribly your injuries and the deplorable manner in which you and other members of the force were treated by certain students.” Local attorney John Fox, an old friend and golfing buddy, sent a jocular note with a hard message. “I am doubly surprised to see that somebody got close enough with a brick to use it on you. I imagine your old age must be causing a slowness in your reflexes,” Fox wrote. “Seriously, Tom, I do want to stress my sincere appreciation for your performance as well as the other police officers in this fantastic flaunting of the law by the students. You and I have talked about this in the past and I am sure we both realized that sooner or later this day would come when absolute force would have to be applied in order to impress these people that law and order still must prevail in this city.”

The captain of detectives called McCarthy into his office and asked, “Tom, what the hell were you doing
there
?”—meaning how did he end up at the Dow protest. McCarthy explained that he had tried to stay away but was recruited by Inspector Harrington to accompany him to Bascom Hill after the trouble started. “Well,” said the captain, smiling, “I’m glad the detective bureau was represented.”

This response reflected the swirl of contradictory feelings at the police department in Dow’s aftermath. Was it an unmitigated disaster in which the cops were undermanned and overwhelmed, or was it a triumph of absolute force? The prevailing wisdom among the police was a bit of both. Chief Emery, while privately uncertain of the chain of events that sparked the violence, went public that Friday in defense of his officers. He told reporters that his men were “actually fighting for their lives” inside Commerce and that they were “overpowered” by an organized resistance the likes of which they had never seen before on the Wisconsin campus. “We were met by brute force that equaled, and at times exceeded, what we could use,” Emery said. “Our use of force certainly wasn’t planned or wanted. But our men had to protect themselves and restore order, and I’m proud of the way they did it.” Emery’s men, especially the thirty or so who had been in the wedge that assembled under the Carillon Tower and marched into Commerce, had not necessarily expected the violence, but many of them were proud of their part. They coined a nickname—the Dirty 30—that boastfully acknowledged their rough methods. The epithet stuck, and for years thereafter, some cops wore Dirty 30 patches on their jacket sleeves to denote that they had fought on the battlefield at Dow.

A
S THE BUSES
from Madison made the turn around Chicago, Dave Wheadon noticed out the window that they had joined a caravan of chartered coaches carrying citizens from the Midwest to the national rally. It was an exhilarating feeling, he thought, to be part of something larger. The atmosphere inside was all buzz, chatter, and debate. Kent Smith, a sophomore history major from the small town of Cornell near Eau Claire, was still forming his feelings about Vietnam. He had decided to make the trip after reading a leaflet handed out at Sellery Hall; traveling alone, he found himself surrounded by people who made him feel like “the most naïve person” there. To Smith the war seemed “fruitless, wrong and unwinnable,” but now he was hearing more sophisticated and cynical explanations for why it was being fought, focusing on American economic imperialism. He listened in amazement as a passenger in the seat in front of him delivered a long, loud lecture about how the United States was in Vietnam not for the Vietnamese but for the profits of Coca-Cola and other American corporations.