Wry Martinis Read online

  Practically every college had its own film society. Berkeley used to put on all-night festivals showing Marx Brothers and Sherlock Holmes until dawn. Every Wednesday at midnight in Linsly-Chit 101 there was a horror movie, part of the Things That Go Bump in the Night series, presented by Gary Lucas and Bill Moseley. They were very noires bětes, these two. Before the showing of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre they presented a skit strongly reminiscent of the mort par cent coupées, the method of public execution that disappeared in the twilight of the Ch’ing dynasty, with V-8 juice splashing all over the same stage where that morning Professor Hartman had lectured on “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Those contrasts were everywhere: L’Incoronazione de Poppea in the JE dining hall, Daniel Ellsberg next door in the common room. Lucas’s and Moseley’s guerrilla theater of the absurd (they would think me so for putting such a name on it) went on gleefully until they told a reporter for the Yale Daily News Magazine that the Bump series audiences were mostly made up of “groyds [Negroes] and fags,” thereby enraging both of those undergraduate groups and making Lucas’s and Moseley’s physical well-being questionable for some time. Moseley called me up at Esquire several years later with an idea for an article on cattle mutilations in Colorado. “I’ve become something of an authority on the subject,” he said. I was glad to hear from Bill, even if the article idea didn’t go over so well at the next article idea meeting.

  Yale was not immune from national viruses, and so for a while people could be seen running naked through the snow outside Yankee Doodle and J. Press. The night that Elliot Richardson, late of the Saturday Night Massacre, came to speak, several hundred Yale men and women streaked through the Old Campus, watched mutely by President Brewster and Mr. Richardson from the steps of Battell Chapel, holding onto their brandy snifters for dear life. The phenomenon was otherwise short-lived. I don’t know if all of this made more or less sense than swallowing goldfish or whatever. I guess it presaged some kind of return to post-Revolution normalcy, though there were still some unspent political energies left.

  I remember being in the Cross Campus Library one night, holed up, trying desperately to understand Heidegger’s On the Origin of the Work of Art—I never did—and hearing shouts of “Ho, Ho.…” At first I assumed it had something to do with Dean Howard Taft, whose nickname was Ho Ho. But as I poked my head out of the cubicle, the shouting became more distinct: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win.” The protestors numbered about twenty. They made a quick march through the CCL, drawing venomous stares from weenies and grim professionals, chanting their support for the architect of what has become a nation where concentration camps, genocide and odes to Stalin are commonplace; and left. John Kerry, looking more and more like his Doonesbury counterpart, spoke at the PU.

  Yale was a place where generals, Marine Corps recruiters, the Secretary of State, and William Shockley were not allowed to speak, but where Fidel Castro’s representatives, Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, Frank Mankiewicz and, for that matter, anyone who called himself a Marxist, were received with the kind of enthusiasm accorded Neil Armstrong on his return from Tranquillity Base. Every time eggs were thrown and a guest speaker was shouted down, the administration promised a thorough investigation of this flagrant disregard for freedom of speech and appointed a special committee made up of history professors, which did—nothing. During the aborted Shockley debate, black and white students surrounded his opponent, William Rusher of National Review, the man who came to refute Shockley’s thesis that blacks are genetically inferior to whites, shouted “Racist!” at him, spat repeatedly in his face—while campus cops looked on—and stomped up and down on the roof of his car. Nothing was done to the people who did this. Yale once again announced serious action, which by now everyone knew better than to take seriously. This was not an endearing part of Yale, and I cannot phrase my bitterness better than the Reverend Julian Hart once did. He was one of my professors in Religious Studies, and his Religious Themes in Contemporary Fiction was the kind of course—as Richard Sewall’s Tragedy was—that made Yale so exciting. He announced one day in class that he would not be returning next semester for what would have been his thirtieth year of teaching. He was asked why, to which he replied, “Anyone who has been around Yale as long as I have has seen the lowest absurdities perpetuated with the highest degree of solemnity.”

  I have to say—I was warned, early on: February 20 of freshman year. There it was, above the fold in that day’s Yale Daily, a little story reporting the findings of Professor Jonathan Spence, Yale’s distinguished Sinologist, to wit that Mao Tse-tung never would have become Chairman without the help of Yale. You see, after being introduced to Communist theory in Li Ta-chao’s Marxist study group in Changsa, the young Mao, aged twenty-six, needed some kind of forum through which to promulgate his political philosophy. The student union of Yale-in-China invited him to be the editor of its journal. Years later in Shanghai, out of money and wanting to form an area branch of the party, Mao once again turned to Yale-in-China, which obliged him by renting him three rooms for his “bookshop.” Because of the success of the “bookshop,” Mao was chosen as a delegate to the First Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, at Shanghai, in 1921. The rest you know about.*

  HARRINGTON SEES U.S. GOING TO COLLECTIVE SOCIALIST STATE

  As for my own youthful passion for terrorism, I was lucky, since I could indulge it through the Yale Daily News Magazine, where I spent most of sophomore year and the whole of junior year, to the everlasting detriment of my liberal arts education. It was in the Briton Hadden building on York Street that I learned Yale’s third lesson—greasing by: perfecting the arts of obtaining dean’s excuses, the power cram, killing off imaginary aunts and uncles so as to postpone hourly tests. Most important of all was getting on well with the dean’s secretary. They were the real power of Yale. All this was necessary in order to write and edit endless copy on the usual lapidary topics: Mrs. William Sloane Coffin, Freshmen Counselors, the legend of Brian Dowling, Politics in the English department, the steam tunnels, Grove Street Cemetery. Our formula was succinctly and accurately described by a subsequent editor as turning major stories into filler items and filler items into major stories. Still, it seemed to work, and on occasion we were able to inflict inaccurate and misleading journalism on our public. One time, when the big question was who would succeed Kingman Brewster as president, we concocted a poll, awarding insignificant percentages to Dean Taft and the three other likely successors and a whopping 40 percent to Professor Kai Erikson—for no better reason than that we were awfully fond of Kai and wanted to give his career a nudge. The faculty took the poll quite seriously and for days Kai’s hitherto-unknown-but-immense popularity among the students was a topic of conversation. Actually, Kai got along quite well without our help, because he really is terrific.

  Another time we devoted an entire issue to a pet subject, drugs, complete with a poll—this time a real, though not statistically valid one—which showed that 14 percent of Yale students had at some time sold drugs. Anyone who sold so much as a joint to a roommate could answer the question affirmatively, and did. Local television picked it up, as did AP and UPI, and America was informed the next day that ALMOST 20 PERCENT OF YALE STUDENTS SUPPORT THEMSELVES BY SELLING NARCOTICS. Yale was in the midst of the $370 million capital fund-raising drive at the time, so the news was not well received at Woodbridge Hall. Dean Martin Griffin spent most of the following week on the phone explaining to choleric alums that Elm and High Streets had not really become the new Haight-Ashbury, while the editors made themselves discreetly scarce. Yale had by then hired a full-time public relations man, Mr. Stanley Flink; and it gave us pride and satisfaction to know we kept Stanley busy. His face got longer and longer until eventually one day it fell off.

  Our last issue we were proud of. It contained stories by Tom Wolfe, Anthony Burgess, Ayn Rand, Ray Bradbury, John Cheever, William Styron, William Saroyan, Joyce Carol Oates, Erich Fromm and Art Buchwald, not an undistingui
shed bunch of contributors to an undergraduate rag. It was John Tierney’s brainstorm: send out letters to great authors asking them to contribute to the Mag—at the top scale rate of one dollar per word. (What Playboy then paid.) Our budget was one hundred dollars, so we could only afford ten-word articles by ten great authors. Fortunately no more than ten replied, so we were spared the awkwardness of sending Norman Mailer a rejection letter. Contributors were asked to write on the End of the World, a popular theme as finals and graduation approached. Anthony Burgess sent an exquisite poem, all the way from Rome, gratis; Tom Wolfe wrote a sixteen-word piece and asked that the remaining four dollars of his fee be sent to “the Connecticut novelist, William Styron, to help cheer him up”; Ayn Rand said she was all written out on the subject.

  I remember those production nights: standing over the light boards for sixteen hours at a stretch; the smell of developing fluid; fingertips stinging from razor blade cuts; the hum and click of the Compugraphic and Morisawa; running up to the Board Room at five in the morning and through a bluish nicotine fog pleading with Lloyd Grove please to finish his goddamn lead article; the glazed look on his face as he said he had only three pages to go. THREE PAGES!? But Lloyd’s copy was always worth the wait. Now they wait for it at The Washington Post. In that last issue we ran the story on why there are daffodils in the moats around the colleges each spring. They were planted in memory of a little girl named Barbara Vietor, who died of asthma at the age of nine. I cannot explain why the memory of the daffodils and a child I never knew should mean so much to me still, but it does, and I will always be grateful to Yale for that, as for so much else.

  —My Harvard, My Yale, 1981

  * Arch.: excessive or pervasive skepticism.

  * I have one consolation, though, in a Yale Daily headline of the same year:

  What Did You Do in

  the War, Daddy?

  Well, It’s Like This.…

  The day I turned nineteen, I went down for my physical and had my first and only experience of Army life. I took with me a letter from Dr. Murphy, my childhood doctor, describing in uncompromising detail the asthma that had been a major part of my life, occasionally severe enough to put me in the hospital for a week. As I shuffled along the line from urinalysis to the hemorrhoid inspection I tried to look wan and generally tubercular, ready to faint if any voice were raised in my direction. One Army doctor looked at my letter with an unimpressed scowl. My hands got clammy and I wiped them on my forehead, hoping the perspiration would give my brow a nicely febrile sheen. At last I came to the end of the line, to a table at which three doctors reviewed the other doctors’ evaluations and ruled on them.

  “Asthma?” said one of them, looking up.

  I nodded feebly and made an emphysematous sound resembling a yes, intended to make him understand the asthma had left me with a dearth of pleura, which I was conserving in order to participate in the sacrament of last rites, which in my case was obviously more or less imminent.

  After the longest pause I have ever waited through, he said, “Rejected.”

  I waited until I was a few blocks from the examination center before breaking into a full run. (They might have been watching.) I have never since run so fast. When a mile later I hit the campus and saw my roommate and some friends across the quadrangle, I broke into a sprint. A few yards from them I jumped and in midair shouted, “I FLUNKED!” loudly enough to cause nearby heads to turn and wonder, probably, what inversion of academic values had caused this deranged jubilation.

  Twelve years later, on a November day in Washington, D.C., I watched as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated. At the edge of the crowd where I stood there was a Marine, about forty years old, ramrod-stiff and impeccable in ceremonial dress. He turned suddenly from the proceedings and, walking a few paces away, took off his glasses, put two fingers of a white-gloved hand to the bridge of his nose, and began to weep.

  Watching his grief made me feel like an intruder. I felt I had no business there, so I left the grounds.

  There was a lot of talk that weekend about healing. It was true the veterans finally did get the welcome home and a measure of the appreciation and recognition that they had always deserved. A group of college students in a Georgetown bar stood up and applauded when a group of vets walked in. That alone seemed a remarkable enough event for President Reagan to make prominent mention of it in a speech shortly afterward.

  In a city once known for its spectacular antiwar demonstrations, there were no sour notes, only the ads on television for a movie that had just opened: Sylvester Stallone working out his post-traumatic stress disorders on a small American town—with an M-16 and everything short of close air support. Good timing, Hollywood! But when it was over—the parade, the speeches, reunions, workshops, the fifty-six-hour vigil at the National Cathedral during which the names of the 57,939 dead and missing were read aloud—there was no doubt it really had been a homecoming. Myra MacPherson wrote in The Washington Post, “Now there is some meager measure of reconciliation; some who used to taunt them [the homecoming soldiers] at army camps and airports—the student deferred taunting those less privileged draftees or those who felt compelled to serve their country—admit guilt and shame.”

  It’s been ten years now since the troops came home, but until recently I had never once heard anyone admit to guilt or shame over not having gone to Vietnam—not in hundreds of conversations about the war. I find this strange; meager, I think, is the operative word.

  The gap between those who went to war and those who stayed behind was larger in the Vietnam War than in any other war in our history. Fifty-three million Americans came of age between the signing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7, 1964, and April 30, 1975, the day Saigon fell to the Communists. Of those fifty-three, eleven million served in the military; and of those eleven, fewer than three went to Indochina. That leaves forty-two million Americans who did not serve. Twenty-six million of these were women, who weren’t called (though the sixty-five hundred women who did serve were essential to the war effort). About sixteen million were men who were deferred, exempted, or disqualified or who evaded the draft. About 80 percent of the Vietnam generation did not participate in the dominant event of their time. About 6 percent of military-age males saw actual combat.

  If the millions tend to blur, consider: How many of your friends went to Vietnam?

  It wasn’t until the memorial opening that I stood face-to-face with my own guilt and shame. These feelings are, I acknowledge, somewhat illogical. My medical disability is genuine—even as I write this I take periodic hits off my asthma inhaler. Into the bargain I suffer from a rather unpleasant vascular malady called Horton’s cluster headache. I did not dodge the draft, starve myself, shoot off a toe, act psycho, or go to Sweden. So whence this permanent malaise? Go figure. Guilt is a pretty personal affair, and it’s not my business to tell people how they should feel about not having gone to Vietnam. But now that the vets have finally come home and the healing has begun, it may be time for those of us who do have misgivings about not having fought to think, out loud, about the consequences of what we did—and didn’t do.

  For those who never left, there is no ceremony and no coming home; if the healing is to be complete, then all the wounds from that war will need healing.

  Those of my parents’ generation who missed World War II were devastated by not being part of it. When an uncle of mine talks about being just too young for that war, he uses the word traumatic. He once told me that for him and many of his peers Korea came “almost as a relief.”

  But it’s hard to compare World War II and Vietnam. A lot of people I know say there’s no good reason to feel guilty about having missed Vietnam. There’s an echo in their arguments from Henry IV, Part I:

  … but for these vile guns,

  He would himself have been a soldier.

  They say it was a lousy war on every score. They talk about My Lai, body counts, fraggings, Agent Orange, the Phoenix Program, the i
nability to distinguish enemies from friendlies; about the long list of horrors that seem peculiar to Vietnam. They feel vindicated, and some of them are startled at the question of whether they feel any guilt or shame at having sat out the war. Okay, some say, the “Baby killer!” business did get out of hand. Any movement has its excesses. But it was our movement, our resistance to the war, our not going that convinced the White House and the Pentagon and the Congress to end the war.

  True, but six months after the fall of Saigon in 1975 James Fallows examined an entrenched fallacy of the antiwar movement in an article for The Washington Monthly called “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” The article had, in the words of the Monthly’s editor, Charles Peters, “tremendous impact. It was a turning point in a generation, being willing to open itself up to other than cliché-left truths about Vietnam.”

  Fallows described how as a Harvard student he had starved himself down to 120 pounds and affected a suicidal disposition at his Army physical. As the doctor wrote “unqualified” on his form, “I was overcome by a wave of relief, which for the first time revealed to me how great my terror had been, and by the beginning of the sense of shame which remains with me to this day.”

  His article was a brilliant and scathing indictment of a system that sent the sons of the working class off to fight its war while allowing the overwhelming majority of the sons of the middle and upper classes to avoid it. One of Fallows’s most penetrating self-criticisms was that while those in the antiwar movement (of which he was a part) convinced themselves they were the “sand in the gears of the great war machine” by burning their draft cards and marching, the real way—the courageous way—to have ended the war would have been to go to war.