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the theretofore secret affiliation between the university and the Institute for Defense Analysis and, therefore, it was thought, the CIA and the Vietnam War. (They actually had a list of ten demands, the first of which was, courageously enough, “Amnesty.”) The aim was to “shut down” the university, and for more than a week that was exactly what happened.
Tom Hayden, national head of SDS and, later, Jane Fonda’s spouse, got involved, as did H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael (with whom I had sat at Linda Lee’s wedding), two nationally known black activists. The extremely tense campus, which had captured the attention of the whole country, was ringed with patrolmen who were becoming angrier by the hour, as for days they had to stand and do nothing to end the occupation and quell what they saw as illegal protests. I spoke to many officers during that period and came to understand that there was a large gulf between classes that played a part in the attitudes. Many of the officers told me that they were angry because the privileged stu- dents were lucky to have the advantages that came with being able to go to college and were abusing their privilege; many also objected to what they saw as the provocative displays by the braless female students.
It seemed that virtually everybody took a position and felt con- strained to wear an armband to signify it. (The B-School types wore blue; they were against the protesters. The faculty wore white; they didn’t want anyone to get hurt. The SDS wore either black or red, depending upon whether or not they styled themselves as merely radi- cal or seriously Maoist. Not terribly courageously, but with my normal prudence, I wore green: I was opposed to violence and was sympathetic to the protesters.)
On the night of April 30, word went around that the inevitable “bust,” the seizure and arrest of the protesters, was imminent. Many students, I among them, rushed to the campus, wishing to be able to bear witness and hoping that their presence would have the effect of eliminating or minimizing violence.
And the bust came. While, as we found out later, black policeman were peacefully removing the black students from Hamilton Hall through underground passageways, phalanxes of blue-helmeted mem-
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