“It sort of appeared on the Harvard scene out of nothing. It literally was created and became very prominent and very influential,” said Peter C. Goldmark ’62, who served as chairman of Tocsin during the 1961-62 school year. Gitlin, who was Goldmark’s successor for the next year, attributed the increased interest to the election of President John F. Kennedy ’40, who brought the nuclear arms race to the forefront of his presidential campaign.

In December, 40 members of Tocsin participated in a walk in which they passed around “a very sophisticated argument about the test ban,” Gitlin said. They asked Tocsin sympathizers to show their support openly by donning blue armbands.

“To our astonishment, 1,000 people wore those armbands,” he said.

But support for Tocsin was by no means universal. According to Glauber, who worked on the Manhattan Project while he was an undergraduate, it was not obvious at the time that all testing should be banned.

“There was a certain rationale for testing weapons,” he said.

The group faced opposition from many of the more conservative figures in the Harvard community.

“We were denounced publicly by a number of faculty members,” Gitlin said, “some of whom were people like Henry Kissinger who had contempt for us, as we did for him. We were controversial.”

EXERTING INFLUENCE?

But student involvement in protesting nuclear armaments eventually extended beyond the bounds of Harvard.

Along with several other disarmament groups throughout the country, Tocsin helped to plan and participated in a march at the nation’s capital from Feb. 16 to 17, 1962. Goldmark even spent an hour inside the White House talking with Kennedy’s top aides, according to a New York Times article from Feb. 17 of that year.

“Starting with the election of Kennedy in November, there could be a sense that since we were so nicely situated at Harvard we could have some sort of special reverberation in Washington,” said Gitlin, noting that the group was well-connected to the Kennedy administration.

“Our sense of our importance was no doubt inflated by this proximity to power,” he said.

In fall of 1963, the U.S. ratified the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited all above ground testing.

“Did the [faculty] petition cause the signing? No. But I think that that petition and others at other places brought that forward,” Mendelsohn said.

—Staff writer H. Zane B. Wruble can be reached at wruble@fas.harvard.edu.