Four Faces of Protest

THE organizers of M-day have tried to make it a national event and have succeeded in drawing many prominent figures into the observance. Still, the demonstration's momentum has relied heavily on local campus leaders with diverse views and backgrounds. Four case studies:

The Harvard Business School is a conservative campus enclave where students still wear three-piece suits. There, Graduate Student Daniel Graham, 25, keeps a green beret in his desk as a reminder of his Viet Nam service as a Special Forces lieutenant--service that won him a Bronze Star. At his home in Atlanta, he has a photo of a Viet Cong he killed in face-to-face combat. Explains Graham: "I didn't want to die. I figured the best way not to was to become a good soldier. I also went to Viet Nam with the best intentions of doing whatever I had to do for my country."

Yet, Graham is an enthusiastic supporter of M-day. "Now I feel guilty for going over there," he says. "I feel ashamed." Solemn and softspoken, Graham traces his transformation to his experiences with South Vietnamese soldiers. For a time, he was in charge of ensuring that each of some 400 of them was properly paid; before that, the payroll had been given directly to a Vietnamese lieutenant and some of it seemed to go astray. He says Vietnamese officers often upbraided him in front of the troops he was advising. Some were so hostile that he became "more afraid of the South Vietnamese than of the North Vietnamese." With three comrades, Graham once killed three Viet Cong in 15 minutes on an infiltration trail that a South Vietnamese officer had refused to explore. "You Americans are always in a hurry," the ARVN leader later complained to Graham. "I intend to be an officer for 33 years."

Whether Graham's experience was typical or his conclusions fair, he is not alone in his bitterness. "There was something wrong with the whole thing," he argues. "It has screwed me up so bad and screwed the whole country up." He now wants the U.S. to pull out "as soon as we can." Why? To win the war, he estimates, the U.S. would have to be willing to lose more than 300 of its soldiers a week for years. "I don't think it's worth killing American boys on the pretense of helping those crummy bastards."

sb

Mass protest has been neither frequent nor popular at Rice University in conservative Houston. The fact that the Rice campus is involved in M-day action results from the work of English Professor Alan Grob, 37, a scholar in Romance literature and one of the university's outstanding teachers. Grob has helped muster the majority of the Rice faculty behind the demonstration. He thinks that the observance will convince the public that opposition to the war "is not a radical movement or a splinter movement but goes across all spectrums of political thought on campus."

Although he has opposed the war from its beginning, and said so in public debates when that position was unpopular in Texas, Grob is no radical. He campaigned for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 on the assumption that L.B.J. would avoid enlarging U.S. participation in the conflict. "I was," he observes, "quite disappointed." Grob had served as a Navy officer in the Korean War and supported general U.S. aims in Southeast Asia. But he was appalled when Viet Nam became "an even deeper morass than Korea."

Grob hopes that Moratorium Day will force the Administration "to choose whether it will remain totally indifferent to the national will. Nixon must be willing to submit to a certain amount of political embarrassment in the service of the national interest." Because he believes that Nixon is "frozen into his present policy postures, including the pursuit of an abstraction like national honor," Grob is not optimistic.

sb

Berkeley is almost synonymous with student protest in the U.S., but Physics Professor William Chinowsky has never been an active sympathizer. A staff member of the university's Lawrence Radiation Laboratories, which has performed much weapons research, Chinowsky is a moderate who professes to advocate rational views toward all issues. Yet he now credits students with creating the ferment that has pressured even aloof scientists to take stands on political issues, including the war.

Chinowsky hopes that his efforts as a campus organizer for M-day will "help create an atmosphere in which we can all --together--examine the problem and discuss the various alternatives. We simply must get the American people to begin thinking rationally about Viet Nam." Chinowsky, 40, an outgoing man with a magnetic grin, is something of an optimist. "I do not see any evidence that Nixon has any idea of what he will do about Viet Nam," he concedes. "But I do think he will respond when it becomes clear that the will of the people is to end the war." Chinowsky's own analysis is that the U.S. "has more than satisfied its commitments" in Viet Nam and now, by its presence, is actually "preventing the Vietnamese from building their own political culture and leadership. It is time that we realize that our commitment is now to our own people."

sb

In a noncombative way, Nashville's Vanderbilt University is divided on the merits of M-day. One campus newspaper supports it, another opposes it. Yet the schedule included a chapel service on M-day, a rally, an open forum in the law library, and a reading of the roll of Tennessee's war dead. Typical of those who planned the activities is Senior Joseph Lipscomb, 21, a math major, who comes from the farming community of Hartsville, Tenn. (pop. 2,000). Engaging in his first protest action, he draws a firm line on the limits of dissent. "I would never burn my draft card," he explains. "That would be illegal."

Lipscomb sympathizes with President Nixon's predicament. "I feel he is sincerely trying to end the war, and I don't blame him for the situation. He largely inherited it." But Lipscomb was willing to join the M-day protest for starkly simple reasons that echo around many campuses and communities. "Bringing a few troops home is only a numbers game to appease college students," he contends. "But they can't be appeased. We will settle for nothing but an end. We are on a course of unilateral withdrawal and it must be speeded up. It is a bad war and we have to get out. Too many lives are being lost."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.