Unleashed Memoir #3: Unrest at Columbia…1968

The third of many parts of my memoir-in-gestation. This time, the campus of Columbia as a young reporter for Newsday…lessons for this campus and others today.

Since so much attention is being generated on college campuses, radiating as it did 56 years ago from the campus of Columbia University in New York, it is worth having a look back at the last time this campus—and colleges across America—were so deeply convulsed and how the leaders of that institution handled what was then and remains a uniquely powerful invasion of their realm. The children who are occupying the campus at Columbia are the children, even the grandchildren of those who convulsed these same buildings a half century ago….the police called in, the administrators out of touch or out of mind. But there are also some fundamental differences, then and now….the enemies have changed, and now we must re-learn where today's ghosts are hidden.

To commemorate another moment from my own past, frozen in time, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter," which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially. I pick up the story on Morningside Heights as a young, but no longer novice reporter who has already learned much on the streets.

Less than two weeks after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, and the riots I chronicled that immediately followed, I was back on the streets of New York for more unrest and violence. But this time, the venue carried less proximate risk to life or limb, at least for most for the army of reporters on hand. The scene was the campus of Columbia University on Morningside Heights—a dozen blocks and a civilization apart from the events in Harlem the night of the King assassination.

This time it was white mobs, students launched into the rarified precincts of their deans and their president. The proximate cause was injustice and other deaths—thousands of them in the rice paddies and jungles of a very distant war. Vietnam then, like Gaza today, had reached the nation’s college campuses as millions of students—enraged by their helplessness in the face of the actions and language of another president, Lyndon Johnson. His intransigence, the fears he raised for their own lives if summoned, as so many would be, to the front lines of a war they did not understand, certainly did not support and a cause that few of them believed in, all sent so many of these young men and women into the streets.

But there are real, substantial differences. Then, the campus was united—against the powers that be. So, the target was Grayson Kirk, president of the university and his coterie and beyond to the regime of Lyndon Johnson and his efforts to pursue a vain and fruitless war a half world away with an appalling sacrifice of American lives—many drawn from campuses just like Columbia. Today, the enemy is too often within—Arabs (just a handful back then) vs Jews. Moreover, the stakes are far higher, the results in many respects more toxic to the fabric of our society and its universities.

The protests of 1968 had two sets of roots, the first stretching back more than a year when an SDS activist named Bob Feldman uncovered documents buried in Columbia’s International Law Library. They spelled out the university’s affiliation with a think-tank known as the Institute for Defense Analyses that was doing weapons-related work for the Defense Department. The university’s failure to disclose this link only provided added ammunition to the school’s anti-war activists who demanded the university sever its affiliation.

On March 27, 1968, the university placed on probation six students who’d led the anti-war initiative and who were promptly canonized as “the IDA Six.” The second set of grievances, dating back even further, dealt with a gymnasium Columbia was proposing to build in city-owned Morningside Park on the eastern fringe of the Columbia campus. The project was seen by much of the student community and leaders of Harlem, which began on the park’s lower slopes, as yet another indication of second-class treatment by the white establishment of inner city New York. By late April, SDS, led by the charismatic firebrand Mark Rudd, had risen to both challenges.

After an attempt to block ground-breaking in Morningside Park, on Tuesday evening, April 23, Rudd led a group of SDSers back to the campus, picking up crowds and momentum along the way. They stormed past the iconic statue of Alexander Hamilton, one of the university’s most renowned early students, and into the eponymous hall behind it, barricading themselves inside the building along with 42-year-old acting Dean Henry S. Coleman and two other college officials, imprisoned in their offices.

Coleman did himself or the university’s cause little good by promptly declaiming, “I have no control over the demands you are making, but I have no intention of meeting any demand under a situation such as this." [Still, four years later, Dean Coleman would be shot and seriously wounded in his office in that same Hamilton Hall. Much beloved, in fact, he would eventually write letters of recommendation to law school for some of his captors of 1969.]

Within hours, 150 black students in Hamilton had thrown out the white students, who promptly marched across to Low Library and took over that building, especially the offices of university president Grayson L. Kirk, vilified as the eminence grise behind the students’ two leading issues—IDA and Morningside Park.

I was there at the beginning, and I’d be there til the end. The three trapped officials—Coleman, assistant dean Dan Carlinsky (who, as a student happened to have invented the first Trivia board game) and proctor William E. Kahn—were eventually freed, but within hours some 340 students had seized and occupied five buildings on the central campus, shutting down the university, though out of consideration (or ignorance) they left the university switchboard in the Low Library basement unscathed and functioning.

Two busloads of New York City tactical police arrived outside campus gates on Amsterdam Avenue. They would remain there for days while university officials sought a peaceful solution.

After three days of occupation, the president’s office resembled a landfill. Furniture was piled into makeshift barricades, vases and glasses smashed, drawers emptied all over the floors. The Rembrandt painting “Portrait of a Man with a Beret,” insured for $450,000 ($3.9 million today) but said to be worth at time $1 million at auction, was hurried into hiding by college employees.

The campus had been sealed by city and university police after black (we still called them Negro in print) militant leaders H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael gained entrance to the campus along with 300 high school students from Harlem.

It was all becoming quite a circus. From time to time, student leaders would parade onto ledges outside the windows of President Kirk’s office and carry on impromptu press conferences, shouting to reporters clustered below. One protestor, David Shapiro, who later became a distinguished poet and literary critic, won a degree of notoriety with his photograph, sitting behind Kirk’s desk wearing dark glasses and smoking a cigar. [Shapiro would eventually graduate, winning his PhD as well from Columbia, a graduate degree from Cambridge University, join the American Symphony Orchestra as a violinist, author 20 volumes of poetry and would return to teach at Columbia as well as Princeton.] He described the cigar as “awful.”

Food was brought in regularly by fellow students, including James Meredith, the first black graduate of the University of Mississippi and at that point a student at Columbia Law School. They were allowed through the barricades as a good will gesture.

Sometime in the course of the third evening, the occupying forces rejected a compromise agreement that had been cobbled together by faculty and administration reps. Grayson Kirk announced suspension of all work on the gymnasium (indeed it was never resumed), but the students were holding out for full amnesty for all the occupiers. The IDA by this time had somehow been subsumed by a broader accusation of racism on the part of the nearly all-white Columbia administration, which oversaw a university whose 27,000 students included barely 2% blacks.

I hung around through the weekend, though frustratingly Newsday had no Sunday paper at that point. But I was eager to be on hand for the denouement. Sure enough—all classes having been canceled for Saturday and Monday—it all went down quickly and quite brutally.

At 1:30 AM on Tuesday, Columbia called the NYPD into action. Marching five abreast up the cobbles of College Row where I’d strolled peacefully myself as a Journalism School grad student just two years earlier, the Tactical Patrol Force troopers formed up in front of Avery Hall and Low Library, facing down some 200 demonstrators and sympathizers who’d gathered, 20 deep, between the police and the buildings.

Right in front of me, a 30-year-old humanities instructor, Frederick Courtney, tried to force his way through the waiting police ranks. He was promptly wrestled to the ground by a half dozen officers, kicked several times, then struck repeatedly with blackjacks, finally carried a short distance to a bush and tossed over it onto the pavement, his face bruised from the beating.

The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper, published some of the most graphic images…..

Some 15 minutes later, the cops, led by the elite TPF, moved in. First, there were warnings shouted through bullhorns that the students should leave peacefully or be forced out. Then, with no response, the ranks of police moved forward, kicking and flailing with nightsticks at least 25 students.

Using crowbars and hacksaws, the first wave of police broke through the barricades and doors and poured into Low Library. Then they began carrying or shoving everyone out. They clearly had little patience with the filthy, bearded and quite smelly protestors they encountered in this citadel of higher education. It was very much “we versus them,” and now “we” were very much in charge.

I saw one girl slung over a policeman’s shoulder and hustled from the building. Many more were carried out, two cops on the arms, two on the legs, and slung into paddy wagons.

In all, 628 were arrested, 120 injured. I spotted at least two lying on the sidewalk having spasms, scores of others nursing wounds as young medics threaded through the crowd administering first-aid. Newsday photographers Vince Cantone and Dick Morseman were on hand to capture it all.

Several of us were also victims of the police action. Robert McG. Thomas of The New York Times, a meaty, but quiet, friendly bear of a reporter who would later share a night rewrite desk next to me in The Times newsroom, was knocked to the ground and struck on the head with a nightstick. I was standing just in front of Avery Hall when cops moved in to clear that building. Shoved to the ground by a detective, I pointed to the police press card pinned to my coat. “Take that off and I’ll shove your glasses down your throat,” he snarled, before turning on other reporters standing nearby.

Journalists aren't placing themselves in the line of fire, asking the hard questions for their own prurient curiosity—they are acting as the eyes and ears, of millions of readers or viewers who are unable to stand alongside us, but are doing so figuratively whenever they pick up a newspaper, turn on their radio or television, or log onto their computer. It is one of the principal reasons for my taking this vastly engaging and compelling life and IF tcareer.

Ironically, the one building cleared peacefully was Hamilton Hall—the first one occupied and still held by the original group of militant blacks. After a police officer shouted over a bullhorn, “You have made your point. If you don’t come out, orders will be issued for your arrest, and you will be removed,” they all filed out meekly.

By 5:30 in the morning, the campus had been secured and the police began filtering out. A half hour later, Kirk called a press conference in the vast rotunda of Low Library where we were also able to poke around a bit. Virtually every piece of furniture had been broken or overturned. In the president’s study, bookshelves were emptied, and cigarette burns dotted the stained carpet. A model of the campus had been tipped over in its glass case. A closet, apparently pressed into service as a kitchen, had stacks of food and garbage spilling out. Surrounded by the mayhem, Kirk told us that the decision to call in the police was “the most painful I have ever made.” Then he added, “It was obvious that no such operation could be carried out without injury. In my judgment, however, there was no acceptable alternative.”

It was an echo of similar actions, and similar responses resounding across college campuses that year and the next. At Harvard, President Nathan Pusey was forced to call in Cambridge cops to evict students from University Hall in the heart of Harvard Yard and within a year after that, he was gone as president. My successor as News Director of the Harvard radio station WHRB—Chris Wallace—son of 60 Minutes reporter Mike Wallace—covered that in his first major debut as a journalist.

A week later, next to a photo of a rather tame student sit-in at Nassau Community College, another story of mine appeared, reporting on the interesting coda that Mayor Lindsay added to the Columbia dustup. In a statement, with no follow-up questions, the mayor observed, “Some police officers…from reports of independent persons in whom I have confidence, used excessive force.”

I would not have been surprised if these “independent persons” might not have included editors of The Times, horrified by the beating administered to young Robert McG. Thomas. The mayor ordered Police Commissioner Howard Leary to report to him promptly.

For the rest of the semester, picketing continued outside several Columbia buildings, and signs appeared across the campus, proclaiming “Kirk Must Go.” Before the start of the next academic year, he was gone. And so, in eight months would I be, from Newsday, onward and upward to The New York Times.

But first, I had several new and quite exciting challenges. The Newsday brass had begun to recognize that college students, and their newly discovered outspokenness, were among the leading challenges to the nation’s social and political order. So, they commissioned from me a major piece for Weekend With Newsday. Headlined “A View From ’72” (the prospective college graduation year of that fall’s entering freshman class) it ran on September 4, 1968, just as the new school year was beginning, with considerable unease, on campuses from coast to coast—even on Long Island.

“What does today’s college freshman think of himself, his world and his future? Is he (sic) different from his predecessors? Here, the freshmen themselves tell what they think of everything from the Vietnam war and slums to parents and the problem of pot” the subhead read, next to a large group picture of freshmen I’d consulted—nine boys and four girls, all freshmen from Long Island and a pretty representative grouping in 1968.

My mission was to chronicle the possible paths some 35,000 graduates of Long Island high schools might take in the next four years—at least the 60 percent who would go on to college.

“They are entering,” I wrote, “a new and strange world: a world of Hegelianism and Cavalier poets, quantum mechanics and differential equations. They are also entering a world of Vietniks and hippies, pot parties and LSD, and football games and frat blasts….The stereotype today is of a long-haired teenager of indeterminate sex carrying a guitar slung over the shoulder with a marijuana cigarette dangling from the mouth and jumping out of an Austin-Healey ready to start four years of degeneracy.”

OK, so British Leyland stopped making the prototypical two-seater sports car of the fifties and sixties in 1972, but you can probably have an image from the rest. Only my project debunked just about everything else in that catalog of debauchery. These young people, straddling the decade of the sixties and seventies, had no heroes, I reported.

“Most of my gods of my younger days had clay feet of one kind or another,” David Silver of East Meadow and heading for Cornell told me.

“It used to be President Kennedy, but I’ve kind of outgrown that,” added Silver’s classmate Aric Press.

For heroes, others cited Jackie Kennedy and Lou Alcindor of the Los Angeles Lakers, the NBA’s leading all-time scorer at that moment. But, I continued, “more on the minds of these freshman…are the problems facing the world and themselves—particularly Vietnam.” Or as Harvard’s Dean of Freshmen, F. Skiddy von Stade Jr. told me, “There are more activist students every year.” A most prescient observation, considering how quickly Harvard’s campus would explode just that next Spring.

And then there were drugs. LSD had just become a part of the undergraduate vernacular when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were being exposed at Harvard for their experiments on Harvard undergrads in 1963, during my undergraduate days. The bylines on this story are compelling: Joe Russin, eventually president of The Crimson and eventually creator of America's Most Wanted, teamed with Andy Weil, eventually a Harvard Medical School grad and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine. [His undergraduate honors thesis was "The Use of Nutmeg as a Psychotropic Agent."]

The drug quickly spread from lab to dorm and across the United States—students beginning to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The newly minted freshmen I consulted were keeping very open minds on the question—the same conclusion reached by several surveys. Some eight to ten percent of these youths would try marijuana or LSD during their college years. “Perhaps a quarter of these students will have tried premarital sex,” I continued. Ah, how innocent we all were back then. But the final coda on my investigation was left to Newsday’s redoubtable editorial board, which devoted its entire page the next Wednesday to commenting on what I’d uncovered.

“Thanks substantially to enlightened college administrations, a Columbia-style incident on Long Island seems unlikely,” the editorial concluded in a remarkable example of self-puffery. Then it turned to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover worrying over coordinated rebellions on 25 college campuses, which would overwhelm the nation’s police forces. And wound up blaming “young demonstrators in Chicago [who] helped create the climate for the police violence that followed” during that summer’s Democratic National Convention of 1968. The answer to the Summer of discontent and its expression by college youths was a simple one: “policemen in the U.S. are underpaid and largely unprepared for this type of trouble in the streets.”

I was quite aghast at the conclusions the eminent editors of Newsday had drawn from my efforts. But then I recalled whose names sat atop the masthead on that same page. Harry F. Guggenheim, President and Editor-in-Chief; Bill D. Moyers, Vice President and Publisher. Two cronies of the exiting president of the United States—Lyndon B. Johnson, who laid the abrupt end to his presidency largely at the feet of the very youths I’d been profiling. Incidentally, just below the top line was another name—Sydney Gruson, then Newsday's associate publisher. It was an individual I would come to know quite well years later at The New York Times.

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It is not without a certain measure of despair that I give you this slice of my memoirs. I am firmly of the belief that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. In 1968, just months before Richard Nixon would be elected President, his vice presidential running mate, Spiro Agnew, rushed to judgment, seizing on the unrest at Columbia for his own ends and with little regard to what the stake had really been, but pandering to some of Americans’ deepest fears….

It would be four more years after the events I've chronicled here before House Speaker Mike Johnson would even be born in the deep southern town of Shreveport, Louisiana. The visit he paid to Columbia last week with his three fellow New York Republicans, none born at the time of Columbia '68, did little to ease passions or point the way to any lasting solution. If he was trying to learn, as he clearly did in reversing course on the critical aid to Ukraine, he should perhaps have withheld any rush to judgment. The other member of the delegation, the venerable Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), 25 years old in 1968, should have known that Mike Johnson’s strident call for the scalp of Columbia's president would do little more than the removal of Grayson Kirk or Harvard's Nathan Pusey did a half century ago. And she even served as a college president herself, in Spruce Pine, North Carolina and now chairs the House Subcommittee on Higher Education. For shame.