Without the fear of a military posting to Southeast Asia hanging over their heads, the Class was content to watch the war wind down on television—even during the final campaigns of the controversial war.

Joel F. Feldman ’76 recalls one wintery day walking out of Holyoke Center and finding a one-man protest against the Christmas bombing campaign in Vietnam in 1972.

“It was a surreal image of this one lone man on a snowy night, beating his drum, playing his harmonica and holding a ‘Stop the Bombing’ sign. There was no mass protest,” he says.

A general apathy settled over campus in the early ’70s, alumni say, as the nation and the student protest movement turned inward to lick its wounds and both focused on the growing scandal surrounding Watergate and President Nixon.

Watergate

Even Watergate—arguably the largest political scandal in American history—failed to ignite the Harvard campus.

While the campus saw some small, scattered protests calling for Nixon’s impeachment, most students watched passively from their rooms as the Watergate drama unfolded.

“Being at Harvard, I think the majority of students of my class had a very cynical perspective of Nixon to begin with,” Feldman says.

“We all figured that of course he had done these wrongs. We weren’t really surprised,” Mary Johnson Osirim ’76 says.

Much of the drama of Watergate unfolded in the summer of 1974, while school was out of session, possibly explaining the lack of campus interest in the drama.

“Everyone was monolithically anti-Nixon; people on campus were euphoric about the outcome,” Saffran says.

Where Did the Revolution Go?

In fact, campus politics had ebbed to the point that it seemed inconceivable to many students that just years before the Square had been rocked by riots and that final exams had been cancelled.

“By the time we arrived at Harvard, the time students collectively thought they could make a difference had waned,” Feldman says.