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Mass revival
completed it. The officer was not amused. And, ultimately, neither were the students.
The time to express political views came sooner than was expected. More than a handful of Amherst students had been on Freedom Rides through the segregated South, but, to my knowledge, through 1966, none had participated in substantial anti-war activity. The only war- related activity that I can recall, however, occurred when some students (all of them jocks) publicly burned anti-war literature, and they were roundly condemned, not for the substance of their politics but for par- ticipating in an act that was contrary to the tenets of a true liberal arts education. Although the country was not as fractured as it would become, there was clearly a good deal of anti-war and anti-Administra- tion sentiment that was welling up in 1966, particularly on the campuses. It was in this context that graduating students returned to Amherst for commencement, which was held one week after exams had ended, and learned, when they arrived, that the college had decided to bestow an honorary degree on the Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara.
No man other than President Johnson himself was more associated with the Vietnam War than was McNamara. A substantial number of students therefore saw the bestowal of the degree as an endorsement of a war that they opposed, and, as is virtually always the case when there is a contest over a substantive issue, there was a substantial “procedural” objection as well. They believed that the college had anticipated that there would be substantial opposition to the awarding of the degree and had therefore delayed the announcement with an eye toward frustrating the mobilization of that opposition.
After it became clear that there was a huge amount of anger on the campus, the college wisely made McNamara available for questioning by the senior class in Johnson Chapel on the morning of commence- ment ceremonies. Not surprisingly, McNamara, a brilliant man with the facts in hand (or at least with his version of the facts in hand), gave a bravura performance. The performance probably did not materially change any minds, but it did defuse what could have been a more vola- tile reaction.
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