1968 - Mark Kurlansky [104]
But the college students of the late sixties were different from those of earlier in the decade. They were even more rebellious and perhaps less skilled at expressing that rebellion. Tom Hayden described Rudd as “a nice, somewhat inarticulate, suburban New Jersey kid with blue eyes, sandy hair, and an easy-going manner, non-descript in appearance, apparently having no time for changing clothes or engaging in sterile debate.”
Rudd’s style and manner were certainly different from those of Tom Hayden or Mario Savio, who were conservative dressers, notably articulate, and frequently engaged in long hours of debate with their movements. Hayden, who expressed himself with a brilliant clarity, may have found Rudd inarticulate by contrast, but the true difference was that Rudd, a tough, avid, and thoughtful reader, did not attach the importance that Hayden did to words. The younger rebels did not believe in civility. While Savio, perhaps the best student speaker of the sixties, was famous for the genteel removal of his shoes to avoid marking up a police car, one of Rudd’s famous moments was sitting in the Columbia University vice president’s apartment and pulling off his shoes.
Being a student in the late sixties was a different experience from being one in the early sixties. For one thing, there was the draft. Neither Abbie Hoffman nor Tom Hayden nor Mario Savio had been subjected to a draft—a draft that threatened to pull students into a war in which Americans were killing and dying by the thousands. Perhaps more important, the war itself, with its cruel and pointless violence, was seen on television every night, and no matter how much they reviled it, these students were powerless to stop it. They could not even vote if they were under twenty-one, though they could be drafted at eighteen.
Despite all these differences, one thing, unfortunately, had not changed—the university itself. If the American university has in recent years been thought of as a sanctuary for leftist thought and activism, that is a legacy of the late sixties graduates. In 1968, universities were still very conservative institutions. Academia had enthusiastically supported World War II, moved seamlessly to firm support of the cold war, and, though starting to squirm a bit, tended to support the war in Vietnam. This was why the universities imagined their campuses to be suitable and desirable places for such activities as recruitment of executives by Dow Chemical, not to mention recruitment of officers by the military. And while universities were famous for their intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse or C. Wright Mills, a more typical product was Harvard’s Henry Kissinger. The Ivy League in particular was known as a bastion of conservative northeast elitism. Columbia University had Dwight Eisenhower as an emeritus member of its board of directors. Active members included CBS founder William S. Paley; Arthur H. Sulzberger, the septuagenarian publisher of The New York Times; his son Arthur O. Sulzberger, who would take over after his father’s death later in the year; Manhattan district attorney Frank S. Hogan; William A. M. Burden, director of Lockheed, a major Vietnam War weapons contractor; Walter Thayer of the Whitney Corporation, a Republican fund-raiser who worked for Nixon in 1968; and Lawrence A. Wein, film producer, adviser to Lyndon Johnson, and trustee of Consolidated Edison. Later in the year students would produce a paper alleging connections between Columbia trustees and the CIA. Columbia and other Ivy League schools produced leaders in industry, publishing, finance—the people behind politics, the people behind war, the very people C. Wright Mills had identified in his book as “the power elite.”
At Columbia the dean offered “sherry hours,” in which students dressed in blazers and gray wool pants sipped pale sherry from cut-glass goblets while discussing campus issues. It was this vanishing world that the administration was struggling