I remember the 1972 spring offensive, when the North Vietnamese army packed its rations, shouldered its rifles and marched south to free its country as American bombers droned overhead. The North Vietnamese issued one general directive, in the form of a poem, part of which follows, "Liberation fighter, spring in Vietnam is ineffably beautiful. Tet is unbelievably epic. Apricot blossoms vie with each other to cheer your feats. Swallows take wing, telling our countrymen north and south of your deeds. Liberation fighter, let off your gun this spring instead of the usual firecrackers. And ornament Vietnam's spring with everlasting beauty." And the American bomber pilots, peering at the tiny figures marching below, may have wondered why these people never surrendered.
We at Harvard followed the offensive's progress, hoping that it would be the final battle of a war that began before both we and many members of the Vietnamese liberation forces had been born. We did not immediately see a role for ourselves in the struggle. But suddenly, the American bombers whined over Hanoi and Haiphong and dumped death earthward while people bicycled below. We held a successful strike meeting, left our classrooms, and tried to blockade the Kennedy building yet another time. In the police wagon that took me to jail, I met a kid I had not seen since he graduated from my high school five years earlier.
But the war continued. Kissinger pretended a final settlement was imminent in October, and at Christmas the war peaked in the final act of brutality. It was epic the way Vietnam braced itself for that final onslaught. Wave after wave of B-52 bombers leveled sections of Hanoi but Vietnam stood fast despite the thundering terror.
The peace settlement at least has ended the war's most brutal aspects. When Congress eventually cuts off the aid which props up the Thieu regime, the Vietnamese can bind up their wounds and follow their dreams in developing their society. Justice has been sidetracked temporarily in Chile, but justice is winning in Vietnam, and the rest of us have learned something about the impregnability of the human spirit.
AND EVEN in the United States, the source for much of the world's oppression, the desire for justice is not extinct. George McGovern went through a cycle in the 1972 presidential campaign; first ridiculed, then respected, the admiration turned to contempt again after he was written off as a hopeless loser. But for me, McGovern's finest moments came in those last few weeks of the campaign. He tried to talk about Watergate but I sensed that his heart was not really in it. As he frantically flew around the country in those last days he talked about Vietnam.
He ignored the missed airplane connections and the rain-drenched motorcades, and rose above the reporters and much of the country as they laughed behind his back. He talked about the suffering in that other country where everything evil about America culminated in a series of criminal apocalypses, and he reminded us of the essential decency of our people. Look, he said to people in Iowa and Wisconsin and Mississippi, if you could hear the screams in Vietnam, if you could see the death, you would weep for our country. I believe that you would have no part of the crimes that are committed in your name. Perhaps that is why the cynics laughed, because he believed in that essential goodness--but I also believe it and I am grateful to him for saying it.
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WHICH BRINGS US to the present. Never in recent years has the future seemed so ruled by contingency. Malaise drifts back and forth across this country, past corrupt public officials, cars idling in long lines waiting for gasoline and disabled Vietnam veterans who need jobs and better medical care. A mean-spirited Nixon government has wiped out all sorts of poverty and teaching jobs. Put simply, there seems to be little ahead beyond more of the same. In response, students here and elsewhere are said to be burrowing back into their private lives: no one is interested in joining the Peace Corps now, and Ralph Nader is said to have trouble finding help. Students seem to be joining a lemming-like rush to law school or medical school, hoping to emerge eventually with a bright badge of professionalism to ward off the encroachments of a colder world.
One response to all this is to write off the current group of college students as hopelessly timid and selfish. I cannot accept this explanation, for I am frightened by many of the same things that trouble my classmates and yet I know my motives are not evil. I though of teaching next year but there are no jobs; I considered organizing but there is no money. I, along with many other people here, intend to fulfill my obligations--but one cannot build without mortar and brick.
Other people, in other places and at other times, have faced much greater problems and surmounted them. President Allende once remarked that he had been expelled from his university's socialist organization in the early 1930s for refusing to adopt all of its positions. He had great doubts about his future at the time, the companero presidente recalled; a progressive government had just fallen, he had been repudiated by his own friends, and he did not think socialism would ever come to Chile.
Yet last September, Salvador Allende, then 65 years old, spoke over the radio for the last time as tanks rumbled toward the presidential palace. He told the Chilean workers to remain in their factories; the military is too strong, he said, do not resist foolishly. This defeat will be only temporary, he said. Then he said good-bye to every tired worker and hungry peasant in all Chile and signed off to fulfill his final obligation.
We can draw upon the past and gain both the knowledge and the inspiration to shape the future. We can learn from Chile and Vietnam and George McGovern and countless other people; we can sharpen our senses until suffering in the most remote region in the world becomes as loud and clear as crying next door. And we can fulfill, each in his or her own way, our obligations to each other, and we can start to take back our planet from the murderers and the liars.
When I was in high school, people sometimes called me an idealist. I would answer that the real idealists were those who believed that the world could continue to groan onward without completely falling apart, that I was actually a realist because I saw change as imperative. I also answered by using an old worn-out quote from Albert Camus--"Perhaps we cannot feed all the starving children in the world. But we can surely feed some of them. If you will not help us do this, who will help us do this?" And for all the quote's disarming simplicity, I still believe it. President, 1973-4