Then, on February 16, lightning struck. In perhaps the single most important event of the year to the movement, the Selective Service decided to draft seniors and first-year graduate students in June. The symbolic confrontation at the Pentagon was now a real one. It was a shock that everyone knew was coming.
Someone had thrown up a wall against the future, and suddenly 1968 was snatched away. Suddenly it became June, and there you were with the war that you told everyone you hated. And a government you never knew had decided your future for you. That was lousy and undemocratic, and back in your mind you remembered that the same thing had happened to people in Vietnam and in America and all over the world. And maybe it was an irrational reaction, but you hated your country for what it did and you didn't want to be a part of it.
There were plans then for a summer in Chicago and all over. Tom Wicker was saying that hundreds of thousands would resist. Then General Hershey would not be able to get enough men, and maybe the war would end in that kind of glory. The thousands of college seniors and grad students would be the raw material for a massive movement for social change in this country.
Then came a hiatus, an interruption--Eugene McCarthy. When we were all sure that it would be Johnson and Nixon in November with no one really caring, McCarthy showed up. In March he nearly won New Hampshire. And then, on the night before April Fool's Day, Johnson told us that he wouldn't run, that he would try for peace. And suddenly, things fell to pieces.
Peace, even a phony peace that will mean war for two more years and no real change in the policies that lead to war, peace is a beautiful thing. And this country embraces it as a beautiful thing. Students, like everyone else in America see war and peace as separate times and separate places. There is nothing in between. For a long time, it looked like this country was at peace.
Then April came, and the next shock hit. Martin Luther King was assassinated, and nothing was different after all. Black students brought America back to the university, just as white radicals had brought the war to the university.
There was a connection there, we all realized at once. The war is America, and America is the university. And suddenly the university became the battleground, in a comfortable, fun university-way. From being students we had gone to become Vietcong at the Pentagon, then to become blacks