In My Time - Dick Cheney [24]
Steiger was in the group that was to visit the University of Wisconsin, and I was chosen to advance the trip. I’d been at the university so recently that I was familiar with the situation in Madison. There had been protests in February in support of black students’ demands for a black studies department. When police were unable to cope with the demonstrators’ hit-and-run tactics, Governor Knowles sent in two thousand troops from the National Guard. Their appearance swelled the ranks of the protestors to some ten thousand. Guardsmen used tear gas and smoke bombs. Students rampaged through campus, destroying property. The protest finally abated, but not the unrest behind it, and a few weeks before the congressional visit in May 1969, students threw rocks and bottles at police trying to shut down a party on Mifflin Street. The police responded with clubs and tear gas, and it was three days before peace was restored.
On the night the congressmen arrived, Students for a Democratic Society was holding a campus rally with the controversial Black Panther firebrand Fred Hampton as the guest speaker. A friend from one of my political science classes was one of the SDS organizers, and I had asked him if he could arrange for us to attend. I can say without hesitation that we were the only people there wearing jackets and ties. We got some hostile looks and a little verbal abuse, but once we took our seats nobody paid us much attention. Everyone was too busy shouting support for the increasingly inflammatory rhetoric of the speakers leading up to the guest of honor.
Hampton turned out to be a skillful orator and a very charismatic individual. He distanced himself from the students who wanted a black studies department, declaring that revolution had to be the goal—and violence the means. He worked the crowd into a frenzy by shouting about how satisfying it was to “kill pigs” and how much more satisfying it was to kill a lot of them. I noted to myself that Hampton was fascinating to listen to—as long as you ignored the content of his message.
The congressional group interviewed students ranging from the editor of the Daily Cardinal, the campus newspaper, which was egging on the demonstrators, to a group called Hayakawas, who were protesting the protests and had named themselves after S. I. Hayakawa, the English professor who had famously stood up against demonstrators at San Francisco State College (San Francisco State University today). They also attended a faculty meeting that was held every week on campus. It was a gathering of senior professors, who tried to keep their meetings private and had largely succeeded. Although I had been a student at the university for three years, I’d never known about the group. When I came to campus with the visiting congressmen, the chairman of the political science department got us an invitation to sit in on one of their sessions.
They set some ground rules: We weren’t allowed to ask questions or say anything; we could only observe. The faculty in the room that day had a long list of concerns—about students, about the administration, about the chaos—but no one addressed the larger context. As we met, college campuses all across the country were in an