Thunderchief. The pilot parachuted to safety. In Manila, South Vietnam’s Prime Minister,
Nguyen Cao Ky, insisted that he was not a crook. Neither were the members of his cabinet, he said, and the fact that a dozen or so cabinet members resigned while Ky was in the Philippines was just coincidence.
In San Diego Bob Hope did a show for Army boys headed in-country. ‘I wanted to call Bing and send him along with you,’ Bob said, ‘but that pipe-smoking son of a gun has unlisted his number.’ The Army boys roared with laughter.
? and the Mysterians ruled the radio. Their song, ’96 Tears,’ was a monster hit. They never had another one.
In Honolulu hula -hula girls greeted President Johnson.
At the U.N. Secretary General U Thant was pleading with American representative Arthur Goldberg to stop, at least temporarily, the bombing of North Vietnam. Arthur Goldberg got in touch with the Great White Father in Hawaii to relay Thant’s request. The Great White Father, perhaps still wearing his lei, said no way, we’d stop when the Viet Cong stopped, but in the meantime they were going to cry 96 tears. At least 96. (Johnson did a brief, clumsy shimmy with the hula-hula girls, I remember watching that on The Huntley-Brinkley Report and thinking he danced like every other white guy I knew . . . which was, incidentally, all the guys I knew.)
In Greenwich Village a peace march was broken up by the police. The marchers had no permit, the police said. In San Francisco war protesters carrying plastic skulls on sticks and wearing whiteface like a troupe of mimes were dispersed by teargas. In Denver police tore down thousands of posters advertising an antiwar rally at Chautauqua Park in Boulder. The police had discovered a statute forbidding the posting of such bills. The statute did not, the Denver Chief said, forbid posted bills which advertised movies, old clothes drives, VFW
dances, or rewards for information leading to the recovery of lost pets. Those posters, the chief explained, were not political.
On our own little patch there was a sit-in at East Annex, where Coleman Chemicals was holding job interviews. Coleman, like Dow, made napalm. Coleman also made Agent Orange, botulin compound, and anthrax, it turned out, although no one knew that until the company went bankrupt in 1980. In the Maine Campus there was a small picture of the protesters being led away. A larger photo showed one protester being pulled out of the East Annex doorway by a campus cop while another cop stood by, holding the protester’s crutches
— said protester was Stoke Jones, of course, wearing his duffle coat with the sparrow-track on the back. The cops were treating him kindly enough, I’m sure — at that point, war protesters were still more novelty than nuisance — but the combination of the big cop and the staggering boy made the picture creepy, somehow. I thought of it many times between 1968
and 1971, years when, in the words of Bob Dylan, ‘the game got rough.’ The largest photo in that issue, the only one above the fold, showed ROTC guys in uniform marching on the sunny football field while large crowds watched. MANEUVERS DRAW RECORD CROWD, read the headline.
Closer to home still, one Peter Riley got a D on his Geology quiz and a D-plus on a Sociology quiz two days later. On Friday I got back a one-page ‘essay of opinion’ I had scribbled just before Intro English (Writing) on Monday morning. The subject was Ties (Should/Should Not) Be Required for Men in Restaurants. I had chosen Should Not. This little expository exercise had been marked with a big red C, the first G I’d gotten in English since arriving at U of M with my straight A’s in high-school English and my 740 score on the SAT Verbals. That red hook shocked me in a way the quiz D’s hadn’t, and angered me as well. Across the top Mr Babcock had written, ‘Your usual clarity is present, but in this case serves only to show what a meatless meal this is. Your humor, although facile, falls far short of wit. The C is actually something of a gift. Sloppy work.’