I will ease my heart,
albeit I make a hazard of my head.
HOTSPUR
T
HE demonstration in front of the Butler Library was above all a big sound. The roar of several thousand strong young voices. They drowned out the traffic noise and the helicopters; for once people sounded mightier than machines.Hell, no, we won't go!
Hell, no, we won't go!
Vice-President Hubert Horatio Humphrey was coming to Columbia University to explain to the students — and to the nation via television
— why the war had to continue: he was carrying President Johnson's message, and the students wanted to make sure that he carried their message back to the President.
Hell, no, we won't go!
Hell, no, we won't go!
It was one of those battles without guns in which President Johnson was beaten into retirement. The kids screamed no to his war. They were high on the sense of their numbers, on the immense sound they could produce, on outrage, on the horror of death, on compassion, on slogans;
some were high on dope or love for Ho Chi Minh or hatred for their parents. But ultimately they screamed no to war because they did not feel that America was in danger. It was a mystery at the time how one half of a small backward country could fight the most powerful nation on earth to a standstill, though it was precisely this disparity of power which in the end defeated American arms. No nation, no democratic na-tion, can fight a war successfully unless its citizens feel personally threatened, and there was no way Americans could conceive of Corn-
70
munist Vietnam ever being powerful enough to bum their homes. To be sure, there were Asians who were said to need protection, and there were global considerations, but not many people want to kill or get killed for distant strangers or the balance of power.
"No President can conduct a prolonged war against a small country and expect to have the nation behind him," a liberal congressman said on television, commenting on the live broadcast of the demonstration.
"The American people have no taste for clobbering the weak. Most of us still believe in fair fights."
Hell, no, we won't go!
Hell, no, we won't go!
It was a bright cold December day. Martha wore her big tartan scarf which covered her face up to her nose and reached below her knees; in her shoulder bag she carried biscuits and apples in case they got hungry.
Milling about with the other kids, laughing and talking excitedly be-tween their angry shouts, they felt their hearts beating together, which made them beat faster. Neither of them had ever been in such a big crowd before and there was surprise mixed with their pride that they were part of it and their voices were part of that roar which sounded as though it came from the bowels of the earth.
"Mark?" Martha said.
Mark stopped to listen.
"You know what?" she said, moving the scarf from her mouth.
"What?"
She leaned close to him to whisper. "Your face looks exactly the way it looks when you make love with me."
He took a deep breath, trying to get hold of himself and just look on, but the excitement was too great for him not to be caught up in it. The crowd thickened and began to heave about; someone stepped on Mar-tha's scarf; she stepped on somebody's feet. But it made no difference:
they were all held together by a profound, almost physical bond of brotherhood.
Hey, hey, LBJ,
how many kids did you kill today?
Mark yelled with Martha. Tossed about by people surging in various directions, separated from each other several times, having to run to avoid being trampled On, they were hoarse, sweating and out of breath by the time they found their way barred by a burly policeman making a stop sign with his oversized hand. They had ended up near the Vice-President's motorcade just as the cars were coming to a halt. There was a sudden stillness, a tense moment of waiting, but no one got out of the cars, the doors remained closed, giving the crowd a sense that the oc- 71
cupants were afraid to come out and face them. Then came a sudden explosion of hysteria: a group of students began to scream.
"Fucking coward!"
"No-o-o-o-o-o!"
"We won't go!"
"Chickenshit!"
"Cocksucker!"
There was a philosophy behind the obscenities, based on the belief that the men who were running the war were, as Norman Mailer put it in Armies of the Night, "capable of burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese jungles, yet felt a large displeasure and fairly final disapproval at the generous use of obscenity in literature and in public."
If they could feel revulsion and horror only at four-letter words, then let them feel revulsion and horror at something. Every shit fuck was a chal-lenge, an accusation. So you think words are shocking, and you're not shocked by napalm raining on children? You set fire to people, and you tell us we should have good manners? Shit fuck meant: it isn't the words that are obscene, but the deeds!
"Fucking cowards!"
The cars with the people in them seemed to be petrified.
Mark took a McIntosh apple from Martha's shoulder bag (it felt as cold as ice) and kept munching it to steady his nerves. Eventually two Secret Service men sprang forward to open the passenger door of the vice-presidential limousine and Vice-President Humphrey emerged from safety into hostile daylight: a tall, stout and ruddy figure, clearly visible in spite of the ring of guards around him.
"Fascist!"
"Asshole!"
"Murderer!"
"Motherfucker!"
The Vice-President stood and waved and smiled.
Was there a bullet for him in the crowd?
The Vice-President stood and waved and smiled.
Hubert Horatio Humphrey, often referred to in headlines as HHH, steeped in the compromises of a lifetime of politics, and now defending a war he was said not to believe in, still retained something of the valor of a man whose middle name honored a hero of the Roman Republic:
Horatius Codes held a bridge over the Tiber single-handed against an invading army in 507 B.c. A name, even a middle name, which recalls a brave act that has survived for twenty-five hundred years is bound to affect its bearer.
Alone stood brave Horatius, But constant still in mind . . . 72
In Humphrey's youth, when Latin and the history of honor were on the curriculum, the poem about his ancient namesake was printed in all school readers, and it must have made a great impression on him.
Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate:
'To every man upon this Earth Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds . .
Macaulay's poetic style had grown as musty as the sentiments ex-pressed, yet they fortified many generations. A few years later, dying of cancer, HHH still attended public functions and gave the smile of a happy man till his last hour. The demonstrators held no terrors for him, at any rate no terrors that showed. Most people watching the scene on television were impressed by his courage, even if they thought he was brave in a bad cause. From where the crowd stood, however, Hum- phrey's bravery looked like arrogance. The students around him were shouting themselves hoarse with hate words, fascist-asshole-pig-mur-derer, and all Mark could see was a fatty-faced politician who went on waving and smiling — smiling! — as if they were cheering him, as if the whole crowd meant nothing.
On a sudden impulse of self-assertion — not only for himself but for all the kids, just to say we're here! — Mark threw his half-eaten apple and hit the Vice-President of the United States of America right between the eyes.
The policeman with big hands, an ox in perfect physical condition picked for crowd control, didn't see whether it was an apple or a gre- nade — he only saw an object flying — and, maddened by the fear that he had been standing beside an assassin and failed to spot him, leaped on Mark with his whole body, knocked him to the ground, then kicked him hard to make him get up. Bleeding from the nose, with a roar inside his head louder than the crowd's, Mark staggered to his feet and was led — half carried — to a police car. His body felt so strange and pain-ful that he longed to sink down and die.
A sergeant, worried about lawsuits and mindful of the death of Lee Harvey Oswald in police custody, grabbed him under the arms to hold him up. "Breathe deeply and tell us if it hurts."
By the time it was established that he had nothing broken or torn in-side him and could stand on his own two feet without assistance, an order had come through the radio. At the request of the Vice-President, he was released and told that no charges would be brought.
They gave him back his library card and let him go.
Unluckily, his throw was caught by the television cameras for all the world to see, identifying him for the university authorities.
Losing his chance of a scholar's peaceful life took no more than a moment's blunder. Expelled from Columbia, forfeiting his draft defer-ment as a student, he became subject to the directive of General Her-shey (now dead and forgotten, though Dana Niven still curses him) or-dering protesters to be drafted ahead of everybody else to fight in the war they protested against, and promptly received his call-up papers.
As for Mark's history of Peru, it was never completed, or indeed prop-erly started, but his notes on his reading, his drafts for various chapters and an introduction are among the papers his father has preserved. Writ-ten in the forthright style of his generation which so irritates the elderly in spirit, the introduction includes these extraordinary sentences:
Columbus descended upon the Americas like an Angel of Death, widening the horizons of human rapacity and cruelty and the fron-tiers of the Spanish Empire. This celebrated criminal, who was himself responsible for the extermination of the native peoples of Haiti and the Bahamas, opened two continents to like-minded alchemists of the new age, who employed every conceivable method of turning human flesh into gold, achieving their most spectacular results in Peru.
No doubt Mark's notion of Columbus as the Angel of Death was inspired by Dali's painting and the radical spirit of the Vietnam War years, when most students viewed the whole of Western civilization as a kind of ma-lignant force in history. Though he argued with Martha that Western civ-ilization wasn't Auschwitz or the Spanish Inquisition but the Sermon on the Mount, Dante, Perugino, Bernini, Goya, the Declaration of Indepen-dence, he couldn't help being affected by the prevailing hostility to all authorities, alive or dead. He wanted
. . . to make up for the lack of outrage in other treatments of the subject, which are so replete with solicitude for the hardships en-dured by the conquistadores in the course of enslaving, robbing and murdering the inhabitants of foreign lands where they had no busi-ness to be in the first place.
This is from his notes on the Spanish method of pearl fishing:
The Spaniards had themselves rowed out to the oyster beds, threw the savages into the sea, pressed their heads under the water with the oars and wouldn't let them come up for air unless they had shells in their hands. The Indians either produced pearls or were drowned; none survived long.
74
There are two exercise books filled with his attempts to describe how the Spaniards kidnapped the Indians from their villages and drove them down into the silver and mercury mines.
These Indians, who had believed in their heathen days that they were the children of the sun, were kept underground for six days and nights at a time, and many fell to their death or were fatally poisoned on their first shift in the "infernal pits", robbed of light forever.
Mark's descriptions show many signs of his ability to put himself inside other people's skin — a rare gift which might have been his saving grace, for whether people are good or bad, useful or harmful, depends not on their moral principles or even their conscious aims, but on the strength of their imagination.
"He was half an actor. He couldn't play other people, but he could feel like them, if he put his mind to it," Dana Niven often says, still insisting bitterly that Mark had the makings of a good man and a good historian, if only he could have continued his studies.
But then the history of his own day caught up with him.
75