Among the participants were McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation and one of the three or four senior formulators of the Johnsonian Vietnamese policy; Marshall, who had three weeks before presented the report of the President's Advisory Commission on the Selective Service to Congress; five members of Marshall's Commission; former FDR braintruster Adolph Berle; and the presidents of Brown, Cornell, and the University of Iowa. About ten student leaders were present, including Craig, chairman of the Harvard Undergraduate Council; Strobe Talbott, chairman of the Yale Daily News; Abby Erdmann, Smith N.S.A. representative and a prime mover behind the December letter to the President; and Steven Cohen, president of the Amherst Student Council.

Two-Man Battle

Steven Cohen, now a Harvard graduate student in economics, and McGeorge Bundy would emerge the two major characters in the battle that evening.

The evening session convened at about 8 p.m., after an informal dinner filled with talk of pot, free love, and the radicalization of American society. "The discussion floundered for about 20 minutes," recalls one student participant, "before Cohen opened up."

Bundy had already claimed that negotiations over Vietnam could not take place because Hanoi refused to negotiate. Cohen, who had spent much of the previous two months studying the subject, said that for the purposes of argument he would concede that the North Vietnamese were not willing to come to the conference table. The Amherst senior suggested, instead, that the U.S., despite the President's periodic polemics of peace, wasn't willing to negotiate.

Bundy looked up rarely during the exchange. He sat a few feet across the "U" from Cohen, drawing, according to Miss Erdmann, impossibly straight lines across a paper, then turning the paper and crosshatching the first set of lines with another set of impossibly straight lines.

Cohen asked the former Presidential advisor if one side could negotiate the surrender of the other side. Bundy, recalled Miss Erdmann, answered that both sides must make concessions.

The Amherst honors student then asked Bundy if, in a nation such as Vietnam without any democratic tradition, the party in power which runs any elections would not always win. The Ford Foundation president agreed that it would.

Cohen's Case

Cohen reminded Bundy of Secretary of State Dean Rusk's request to the Viet Cong to lay down their arms and join the free elections.

He then reportedly quickened his rapid fire delivery and pulled his case together. The Secretary of State, Cohen said, was therefore excluding the Viet Cong from ever holding power because, as Bundy himself had just admitted, the U.S.-supported government would run future elections, thus maintaining itself in power. The Administration, therefore, was calling for the surrender of the enemy without demonstrating any willingness to make any real concessions. Cohen then asked if this didn't prove that the U.S. was not really ready to negotiate.

The former top foreign policy administrator admitted that Cohen was right.

The student then changed his tack and, again for the sake of debate, conceded that if a genuine coalition were formed with the Viet Cong, South Viletnam would probably go Communist within four years. Cohen asked why it was so important to Bundy and the Administration if Vietnam did go Communist.

Bundy replied with what one student called a "nineteenth century British balance of power philosophy." He said the U.S. was helping to prevent a third world war by stopping the Communists in South Vietnam.

Cohen reportedly retorted that, far from helping to prevent a third world by stopping the Communists in South Vietnam, the U.S. instead had both greatly increased the likelihood of a third world war and was driving a basically nationalistic Communist state to the international Communist giants in order to obtain arms for defense.