This year, many members of SDS perceived a change. At the beginning of the semester, more than 1000 students (including graduate students) signed interest cards, and the initial general membership meeting atracted about 200 people. Disaffection with the war seemed to be growing, and SDS members believed that people were increasingly willing to commit themselves. Moreover, there was another stimulating issue: the draft and class rankings. SDS was virtually the only organization eager to take an active stand on the rankings.
With the visit of McNamara, SDS saw yet another opportunity to generate interest in itself and in the war. Here was a clear-cut chance to do something -- a chance for a large number of SDS members to become involved in a significant anti-war protest. There was a good deal of personal satisfaction in this prospect for more experienced SDS leaders, who anticipated shattering the stolid indifference of the Harvard campus. The McNamara visit, then, was not to be ignored. It was potentially at least, the stuff of which strong organizations are made.
SDS now began its public sparring with the Kennedy Institute. From this point on, relations between the two groups deteriorated slowly but steadily. Gordon, because he was respected by both sides and because he kept certain confidences, was still able to act as a go-between. But though he frequently talked to the antagonists, he was not able to eliminate the basic conflicts.
Part of the problem was personality friction between SDS's leaders and Barney Frank. Frank was trying desperately in every way he could to make the stay of the first and probably most important honorary associate a successful one.
Frank had been picked for the Institute job because, among other reasons, politics fascinated him and he was one of the most popular tutors in the College. But his popularity never really extended into the ranks of student "radicals." They did not dislike him; Frank and the young leftists just didn't know each other very well. Many of Frank's undergraduate connections are in Winthrop House, never known as a bastion of radicalism. Moreover, Frank was not tempermentally inclined to seek out students on the left. Though he worked in Mississippi for COFO in the summer of 1964, he had not, like many civil rights workers, cut his ties with conventional politics. Far from it, he remained a Regular Democrat (capital R and capital D), even if a very liberal one. During the past state campaign he worked for the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Edward J. McCormack.
Frank personally alienated many -- if not most -- members of SDS. By the time the controversy was reaching its final stages, he was hitting them with statements such as: "If SDS can find no other legitimate channels for a protest in a University as liberal as this one, it is simply a measure of their intellectual impotence."
Frank had his own reason to be annoyed. What bothered him most (and what provoked his caustic statement) was that he was not against protest but, on the contrary, had done everything he could to see that SDS's right to protest would be both respected and protected. SDS did not seem thankful for this gesture, nor did it seem willing to reciprocate by giving assurances that the demonstration would be peaceful. These conditions, Frank thought, were within the rules of the protest game as it had been played at Harvard and as it should be played. SDS's cold unresponsiveness angered him.
On the Wednesday before McNamara was due to arrive in Cambridge, the Institute and SDS made what was to be the last serious attempt to resolve their differences. The petitions asking for a debate had already been collected, and the challenge to the Secretary of Defense was formal. Richard Neustadt called two leaders of SDS (Ansara and Eric Lessinger '68) into his office, and with Frank sought to convince them that there were good reasons for not permitting a debate. Until this time, Neustadt had remained relatively aloof from the public conflict. He had been preoccupied with a series of important lectures he was delivering at Columbia. But he was not able to dissuade either Ansara or Lessinger. Nothing was accomplished; each side held its ground, and the central difference became increasingly apparent. The Institute and SDS were talking about different things.
In the Flesh
"SDS never really wanted to negotiate," Neustadt said the evening after the McNamara confrontation. In fact, neither side ever strayed far from its basic position: the Institute was willing to guarantee a peaceful demonstration so long as McNamara was insulated from it (something SDS could have on its own any time); SDS insisted on McNamara in the flesh -- either standing before a public podium or stranded in the street. "All SDS wanted," Neustadt said, "was to embarrass the Secretary of Defense."
The reasons that Neustadt turned down a debate have been repeated endlessly, but they can bear one more review. His program for the "honorary associates" had been founded on the premise that everything these men said would be off-the-record. The Institute's undergraduate activities were aimed at bringing students into closer contact with politics; the rationale behind the associates program was that Harvard had enough public speeches by enough important people, and that real understanding could be better served by small, informal meetings. Neustadt felt it only fair that if men of public stature were to give two or more days of their time to this sort of activity, the Institute should give them something in return: first, the assurance that they wouldn't be coerced into making public statements, and second, the assurance of several days of relative tran-quality so that they could gain something themselves from contact with an academic community. And, in the case of McNamara, the case against debate seemed even more compelling. Neustadt was not about to pressure the Secretary of Defense into a session whose primary purpose would be to discredit government policies; to do so would be to violate the terms of McNamara's invitation and to surrender to unconcealed threats.
SDS took the rejection and resolved that evening (Wednesday) to answer it with a rally and a "disruptive" demonstration in the Quincy House courtyard. (Simultaneously, however, it resolved not to interrupt any of the private sessions.) Now that the possibility of debate had been formally disposed of, the major questions revolved about the nature and location of the demonstration. But things were not as simple as they seemed.
An extraneous issue had entered the controversy with the selection of the