The Korean War was relatively brief and had less impact than the Yale administration feared, but once again hardly anyone suggested institutional neutrality in that conflict or more broadly in the Cold War. In 1951 President A. Whitney Griswold defended liberal education as essential preparation for lieutenants who knew why they were fighting.1 Until the mid-1960s the Cold War consensus reigned in the classroom, the research and writing of faculty concerned with international relations, and in the minds of almost everyone connected with Yale. This was the university of Henry L Stimson's commitment to "active duty in peace and war", of Secretary of State Dean Acheson who was "present at the creation" of American world power, and of the pioneer geopolitical "realist" Professor Nicholas Spykman. In those years Yale graduates disproportionately populated the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency; and in New Haven the University dutifully prepared and stocked shelters against nuclear fallout during the confrontations with the Soviet Union in 1961 crisis over Berlin and in 1962 over missiles in Cuba. When the United States under President John F. Kennedy in 1961-63 increased the number of military combat advisers to South Vietnam in an escalating civil, little notice was taken at Yale or, for that matter, in the country at large.

Southeast Asian Studies at Yale

    Yale did have a small Southeast Asian studies program, but it had been plagued by early misfortune and was focused on primarily Indonesia. The first professor specializing in contemporary Southeast Asia was Raymond Kennedy, a charismatic, square-jawed man with the short hair and intent eyes of a Marine colonel. Kennedy graduated from Yale College in 1928 and for three years sold American automobiles in what was then the Netherlands East Indies. When the economic depression dried up the market, he came back to Yale for a Ph.D. in sociology and throughout the 1930s as graduate student and junior professor was often in Southeast Asia. During World War II as an intelligence analyst In the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) and the State Department he was a blunt and prescient critic of the British, French, and Dutch colonial empires. For example, in 1944 he wrote that "a savagely repressive attitude toward native political activity, made the idealistic statements of French colonial policy a hollow mockery in Indochina." With Japan's defeat in sight, he warned that "American military operations in Southeast Asia involve potential danger to American prestige among the peoples of the area, because the latter are bound, regardless of our protestations to the contrary, to link American military forces with the reentering Anglo-Dutch-French military and civil administrations." And in October 1945, with the war over, he urged that the United States oppose the use of force by the French in Indochina and make clear that "our willingness to see French control resumed is predicated on the assumption that future events will bear out the French claim to have the support of the Indochinese population."2 These opinions were anathema to the State Department's European desk officers, and they blocked publication of a Kennedy article in the Department of State Bulletin.

    Kennedy returned to New Haven in 1946 and became one of Yale's popular, outspoken, iconoclastic teachers. The central theme of his teaching was that "the caste line of oppression and exploitation, whether in America or the colonies, is a race and color line." In a 1947 lecture on "Race Relations: Colonial and American" he condemned more fiercely than anyone else at Yale the pernicious doctrines of white supremacy. He said that American Negroes (the term in use at the time) at least were citizens and could hope to attain legal equality. But where colonial powers refuse to change the laws, colonial peoples will "change the laws themselves, by means of revolution and seizure of the government for themselves." The French in Indochina are the worst, he said, and there is no hope for them.

    Kennedy was the driving force behind the creation in 1947 of the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, Yale's first inter-disciplinary area studies program and the prototype for programs which would eventually focus on all regions of the world. The Carnegie Corporation In New York provided ten years funding. In 1949 Kennedy embarked on a 15-month research trip throughout Southeast Asia to study the interaction of western and local cultures. In April 1950 he was murdered in western Java along with Robert Doyle, a Time-Life reporter, when their jeep was ambushed by an armed band. The killers were never identified. Kennedy would not have reached retirement age until 1976. With his death the United States and Yale lost an informed voice of conscience.

    John F. Embree, Kennedy's fellow Southeast Asian specialist also died (of illness) in 1950 and the program struggled on while the Carnegie support ran out. The emphasis remained on Indonesia, although Paul Mus, the French authority on Indochina, was appointed in 1952. In 1959 Yale turned successfully to the Ford Foundation and soon carried out a promise to make at three new appointments in the field. By the 1960s Yale was rebuilding Southeast Asian studies, offering courses in the Vietnamese language, and training a respectable number of doctoral students in several disciplines -just in time to provide informed opinion when dissent over the American role in Vietnam began to roil the nation.

Three Dissenters: Thompson, Lynd, and Coffin
    The United States government in 195O began to equip the French forces in their bloody war to retain their colonies in Indochina. Secretary of State Dean Acheson, a dominant member of the Yale Corporation (board of trustees) made the key decision. But the gift of American planes and tanks could not save the French from defeat in the battle of Dienbienphu in 1954. They withdrew from Indochina. "Jungle Jim" Kennedy had been right. Vietnam was temporarily divided between nationalistic Communists led by Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi in the north and an unpopular American-supported regime in Saigon in the south. Presidents and Kennedy used military and economic aid and thousands of advisers to shore up the Saigon regime. Nothing worked. In 1965 President committed American forces directly to the war, and precipitated dissension in the United States soon to become more bitter than any since the coming of the Civil War a century before.3

    Beneath the apocalyptic rhetoric of opponents and defenders of the war were different views over the relation of past to present and the character of the American nation. Defenders of the war argued that American action in Vietnam was the latest chapter in the commitment of the United States since 1940-41 to defeat or at least contain totalitarianism and give democracy a chance. The defeat of Germany and Japan; the reconstruction and strengthening of western Europe under the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the Berlin airlift of 1948 and subsequent creation of a democratic West Germany; and the Korean War were the honorable antecedents of Vietnam- past and present were identical. The United States had to chose between winning in Vietnam or abandoning its commitment to freedom, destroying its credibility, encouraging the spread of international Communism, and making a third world war more likely. The choice required accepting the tragic necessity of using force against force and the death of innocents as well as soldiers. Tragic necessity was not immoral as long as the higher goal was a moral world.

    Moderate opponents like Senator J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and most American scholars of Asia- including those at Yale-agreed that American foreign policy before 1965 had been right, moral, and effective. But the situation in Vietnam bore no resemblance to the past. The Communist affiliations of the Vietnamese were incidental to their nationalistic determination to be free of foreign domination. President Johnson and his advisers were intoxicated by the "arrogance of power" and blind to the differences between Vietnam and previous undertakings in the Cold War. The blindness and its consequences were immoral and destructive of American national interests.

    A third position was occupied by radical opponents of the war and was most fiercely argued at Yale and on other campuses by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). It held that the past and present behavior of the United States government was identical in iniquity. Vietnam demonstrated the continuity of an American effort fueled by the military- industrial complex to dominate the world, ignore the democratic voice of the American people, suppress the wretched of the earth, and risk nuclear war in the interests of capitalist profit.

    The national dissension over the Vietnam war swept over Yale relatively late and non-violently. Dissension came late because issues of racial injustice were a higher priority for engaged faculty and university officers than a small and distant problem in Indochina. Furthermore, the realist tradition of foreign policy analysis with its wariness of moral argument was still strong at Yale. When dissension arrived there was a rising tide of panel discussions, study groups, signed petitions, letters to the editor, and lobbying trips to Washington. But no mass demonstrations, occupations of University buildings, heads cracked by police clubs, or nonnegotiable student ultimata to the administration. The absence of damaging violence was partly a matter of luck, but also the result of a university president who listened and took seriously the anti-war arguments even when he disagreed. Yale's twelve undergraduate residential colleges may also have inhibited violent demonstrations by bringing faculty and students together in small groups and inhibiting mass organization.

    However, the war forced Yale, as it forced all universities, to wrestle more painfully than ever before in the twentieth century with the meaning of academic freedom, the nature of obligations to the Federal government, and the concept of institutional neutrality when morality and politics were entangled. The story of the impact of the war on Yale is a case study not in radicalism, but in the ways an institution with philosophically conservative leaders and faculty came eventually to see the Vietnam war as morally and politically wrong. The refrain "For God, for Country, and for Yale" after Vietnam no longer meant that unquestioning service to the Government was always a sacred obligation.

    One way to understand Yale's response to the Vietnam War is to focus on how President Kingman Brewster, Jr. (in office from 1963 to 1977) dealt with anti-war dissent, trying simultaneously to uphold academic freedom and condemn disobedience to law. His self-education took him from complacency, to troubled support for the war, to vociferous opposition. As a Yale junior and senior in 1940 and 1941 Brewster was chairman (editor-in- chief) of The Yale Daily News and a principal founder of the isolationist America First Committee. His criticism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for leading the nation toward war was nationally quoted. Brewster was already a public figure. But in the months before Pearl Harbor he abandoned isolationism and in 1942 joined the Navy and became an aviator. After the war he earned his law degree at Harvard, was a staff member on the American mission overseeing the Marshall Plan in Europe, and joined the Harvard law faculty. In the early Cold War he was a typical internationalist of the eastern "Establishment". He became Yale provost In 1960 and president in 1963 after the death of A. Whitney Griswold.

    One of Brewster's closest friends was McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson until mid-1965. Although they had been on opposite sides of the isolation- intervention debates of 1940-41 when both were Yale undergraduates,4 Brewster's and Bundy's opinions on foreign policy in 1965 in relation to Vietnam were similar. Both saw the American presence in Vietnam as essential to containing Communist expansion and preserving American security in a non-totalitarian world. Until 1965 Brewster paid little attention to the Vietnam war or to the still weak and scattered voices of protest. His greatest concern about the external world was over racial injustice. He was proud that Yale gave Martin Luther King an honorary degree at commencement In June 1964 and he responded vigorously to criticism from reactionary alumni.

    In May 1965 he dismissed some of the anti-war protests and teach-ins around the country as "ludicrous mockeries, on the level of stuffing telephone booths and other expressions of egoism."5 But the response to the war of three people at Yale--far more mature and serious than stuffers of telephone booths-was about to test his presidential skills. One, Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., was already famous for his participation in the civil rights movement; the second, Assistant Professor of History Staughton Lynd would soon be famous; the third, a Philosophy Instructor named Josiah Thompson, did not seek the limelight.

    We begin with Thompson, a lowly Instructor in Philosophy. Thompson graduated from Yale College In 1957 and the next year as a Navy ensign in command of an underwater demolition team during the U.S. landings in Lebanon he acquired "a deep distrust of the the public justification for U.S. military action .... When Vietnam cranked up in the early 1960s, it was a case of deja vu." After writing a Yale dissertation on Soren Kierkegaard, Thompson started teaching. At an anti-war meeting led by Staughton Lynd he picked up a document entitled "Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam" drafted and circulated by a coalition of radical anti-war groups. To sign the declaration was to oneself to active civil disobedience- refusal to serve in the armed forces, encouragement to others to do the same, actions to block the shipment of men and munitions to the war. Thompson decided to use the declaration as the basis for a term paper assignment in his Philosophy 12b, Problems of Value, He instructed the students to make a considered ethical choice-sign or not sign--and to write a 10-page paper explaining the decision by grappling with the question of when "is civil disobedience justified? Are there limits to an individual's obligation to the state? If an individual believes the state to be acting unjustly may he terminate his allegiance to it, or is he duty-bound to continue his allegiance?" The closing instruction read: "You are reminded ... that true ethical reflection terminates in action. Unsigned declarations may be discarded or returned to me; signed declarations may be forwarded to any of the listed addresses."

    Thompson told the Yale Daily News that he was not recommending that students either sign or not sign, but that they confront the connection between ethical discussion and ethical action. He said it would be "an abuse of the privilege of a teacher to use the petition for political purposes, rather than as an instructional aid in the course."6 One of the students in the course told his father, Arthur L. Stern, about the project. The father-Yale alumnus, lawyer, and himself chairman of the board of trustees of the Rochester Institute of Technology-wrote President Brewster and quoted Thompson's injudicious marginal comments on the son's paper. For example, when the son wrote that signing the Declaration meant accepting Communist propaganda and believing that President Johnson was lying, Thompson jotted: "No responsible opinion believes the stated reason to be our principal reason for being in Vietnam." The elder Stem said he was aware of the danger of interfering with "the freedom of members of the faculty to teach in their own fashion" but in this case freedom might place "the future well-being of the students" in jeopardy.

As we all know, sophomores are an impressionable group. More than that, they are at the age where military service in Vietnam may seem particularly abhorrent and anything may seem appealing which might lessen the chances of being called for such duty.

Brewster took the almost unprecedented step of calling Thompson to his office, asking for an explanation, and a written "brief" in self defense. The academic year was now almost over and Thompson had accepted a tenure- track position at Haverford College for the following year, but he never forgave Brewster for on the one hand saying to Stern he had not intended to abuse his position as a teaching but that on the other hand he would not be at Yale next year. Thompson believed that was an implicit suggestion that he had been terminated.

    Staughton Lynd, son of the eminent sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd, came to Yale in 1964 as an assistant professor of history specializing in the political ideas of the American revolution. Lynd was described by one senior historian at Columbia, where he earned his Ph.D., as "Just about the best student I have ever run across."7 Yale first offered him a job in 1962, but Lynd declined in order to teach at Spelman College, a black woman's college in Atlanta. "History is being made intensely in the South just now .... I believe I have much to learn as a whole human being as well as a teacher from living here."8 Two years later he reconsidered in part because the administration at Spelman fired his friend and fellow radical historian, Howard Zinn.
Lynd began a five-year appointment July 1, 1964. That autumn Lyndon Johnson won election over Senator Barry Goldwater whom he depicted as a reckless warmonger who would bomb North Vietnam and embroil the United States in a bloody war. In the first months of 1965 Johnson did exactly that. Lynd moved, as did many radical activists, from concentrating on racial discrimination in the United States to opposing the war In Vietnam. He spoke at small meetings at Yale such as the one where Josiah Thompson picked up a copy of the "Declaration of Conscience Against the War in Vietnam" and in April 1965 he was one of the leaders of the first large anti-war rally In Washington. During a march toward the Capitol he was splashed in red paint by a counter-demonstrator and his dramatic photograph appeared in the press and on television across the land. To Lynd

it seemed that the great mass of people would simply flow on through and over the marble buildings ... nothing could have stopped the crowd from taking possession of Its Government. Perhaps next time we should keep going .... One can now envision a series of nonviolent protests which would. question the legitimacy of the Administration's authority where it has gone beyond constitutional and moral limits, and might, if its insane foreign policy continues, culminate in the decision of hundreds of thousands of people to recognize the authority of alternative institutions of their own making.9

Here, with Its evocation of the romantic days of the American Revolution, was the authentic voice of radical dissent.

    Overnight Lynd became a national figure. In a series of widely publicized speeches he accused the United States government of following a murderous course and he openly advocated civil disobedience as a means of bringing the war to an end. President Brewster was soon deluged with irate letters denouncing Lynd's views and asking how Yale could permit his continued presence on the faculty.

    Brewster wrote Lynd on June 2 and enclosed a typical letter with a news clipping. "I'm getting quite a few of these. Before I reply I would like to know what you did say. Since I have too often been misquoted and misinterpreted by the press, I don't want to buy their version if it is not substantially correct." Lynd replied that the newspaper account was accurate and invoked his own Quaker convictions and the legacy of Henry David Thoreau and the abolitionists in the crusade against slavery. "I think It is my duty as a Christian and a citizen to put my body in the way of the (as I see it) needless murder going on in Vietnam, and the drift to nuclear war. I am prepared to take the consequences for my action."10 Brewster then prepared a stock letter to those who demanded Lynd's dismissal, saying that he disagreed with Lynd's Ideas but found him acting "in the most honorable pacifist tradition." He would not interfere with Lynd's freedom of expression because "political conformity, whether lured by popularity or coerced by censorship, would be wholly subversive of the whole University tradition."11

    Lynd escalated his actions and words in step with the escalation of the war. In December 1965 he joined Tom Hayden, a founder of the SDS, and veteran American Communist Herbert Aptheker on a "fact finding" mission to Hanoi in violation of a U.S. State Department ban on travel to North Vietnam. In Hanoi Lynd publicly accused the Johnson administration of lying and waging immoral war. Now the deluge of protests reaching the Yale president's office made the earlier complaints seem a mere drizzle. The chairman of the Yale Alumni Fund (who happened to be a son-in- law of Dean Acheson) in a letter to all volunteer class agents seemed to threaten the flow of gifts to Yale if Lynd remained on the faculty. Brewster's assistant, Sam Chauncey, drafted a reply saying that Lynd's actions were "indefensible and damaging to Yale" but he hoped they would not affect giving.12 In a public statement Brewster used words from the law of treason, saying that Lynd's trip to Hanoi gave "aid and comfort to a government engaged in hostilities with American forces. ... By this irresponsible action I believe he has done a disservice to the causes of freedom of dissent, freedom of travel, and conscientious pacifism."13 Privately Brewster asked the History chairman if Lynd was meeting his academic obligations. The answer was yes, although the chairman was surprised to find that Lynd had scheduled all his weekly teaching on two consecutive days.14

    Was Brewster in effect making Lynd's position at Yale untenable and thereby violating the principle of academic freedom? Lynd later so charged. But Laurence R. Veysey, Yale alumnus and historian of higher education, praised Brewster for upholding academic freedom by his

courageous stand in not allowing irrelevant pressures to affect the retention and possible promotion of Professor Staughton Lynd. The only relevant issue is the quality of his teaching and his scholarly publications. How he spends the rest of his time is nobody else's business. For recognizing this and thereby honoring the true meaning of academic freedom, you deserve the gratitude of every alumnus who is concerned with Yale's ultimate reputation as a scholarly institution.15

The course of events, however, yields an ambiguous answer. The academic year 1965-66 was Lynd's last as a Yale teacher. He had a Yale Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship on full pay for 1966-67 and an unpaid leave for 1967-68 to "explore new patterns of vocation in Chicago" involving a combination of social work and college teaching. During that year he sought history positions at several colleges and universities in the Chicago area and was repeatedly rejected. He did receive an offer of an associate professorship at Chicago State College. But the Board of Governors of Illinois Colleges and Universities vetoed the appointment because of Lynd's trip to Hanoi. Meanwhile, the question of Lynd's possible Yale promotion was not scheduled to be considered until the spring of 1968, although all six of the nontenured American historians, including Lynd, had been told by the chairman that the University's current no growth policy made tenure extremely unlikely. At this point The Columbia University Forum published the text of a speech Lynd had delivered in Chicago charging that Yale was violating his academic freedom. He said he believed President Brewster was pressuring the History Department to get rid of him,- -"when push came to shove, they have chosen to protect Yale rather than me." Lynd added that he wanted a tenure offer from Yale only for the satisfaction of declining, but "I intend to oblige Yale, If it wants to get rid of me, to fire me and say why." Lynd also recalled that when he had first been offered a position at Yale In 1962 the then chairman of the History Department warned him not to leave his briefcase in his car because of the proximity of "darkdown" or look for housing in a certain neighborhood because so many "sons of Abraham" lived there.16

    The Forum article incensed the new chairman of the Department, Howard R. Lamar, and other full professors. Lamar wrote but did not send a scorching letter to the Forum's editor. Instead Professors Morgan and C. Vann Woodwood replied to Lynd. They denied that the Department was under pressure. "If Yale were the kind of place that Mr. Lynd says it is, neither of us would wish to stay .... In our opinion he has acquired by his unfounded accusations ... a reputation for martyrdom which is undeserved."17 The Forum article also led the History graduate students to conduct an investigation of accusations which, if true, meant that Lynd had been wronged; if false, that the Department had been defamed; and if resulting from misunderstanding "then the misunderstanding had been disastrous."18 The investigating committee concluded that the Department "had always treated Lynd fairly and even generously," but found President Brewster's public criticism "very wrong." The committee hoped "that the present bad feeling will soon subside, and that a place for Lynd will be found at Yale, for he has much to contribute to the community."19

    In March 1968 the tenured members of the Department voted not to recommend Lynd for promotion and in May Lynd wrote that he did not intend to return for the final year of his appointment. The Department considered this a resignation. The Lynd issue was officially over, but his name would linger in memory, especially among conservative Yale alumni, for the rest of the century.20

    The only opponent of the Vietnam war more prominent than Lynd was the University chaplain, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Bill Coffin-Yale College 1949 and Divinity School 1955- came back to Yale in 1958 as University Chaplain and brought the external world with him He was 34, a veteran of World War II and the early years of the Central Intelligence Agency, a fearless man of conscience with a dramatic command of words and a taste for adventure. His ministry challenged the morally complacent and infuriated the targets of his criticism. He was also a many-layered Blue: his uncle the Rev. Henry Sloane Coffin had been president of Union Theological Seminary and a fellow of the Yale Corporation from 1921 to 1945. His father, class of 1900, was a successful business man. In his youth Bill had lived In Manhattan, California, and Europe before graduating from Andover in 1942 In the same class as George Bush. He joined the Army, was assigned to intelligence, and was given a crash course in Russian In order to serve in a liaison unit dealing with the allied Red Army at end of the war in Germany. Under orders flowing from a high level agreement Anglo- American-Soviet agreement, he was a junior officer involved with the roundup of Russians in that part of Germany under American control and repatriating them against their will into Soviet hands. Some of the Russians had been prisoners of war, but others had fought against the Soviet Union. Coffin knew that most of these men faced a Siberian gulag or execution once they were turned over, but he carried out his orders. He wrote afterward that what he did "left a burden of guilt I am sure to carry the rest of my life. Certainly it influenced my decision in 1950 to spend three years in the CIA opposing Stalin's regime. And it made it easier for me in 1967 to commit civil disobedience in opposition to the war in Vietnam." 21

    In the CIA, 1950-53, Coffin trained exiles from Eastern Europe for clandestine operations Alas, these agents disappeared after being parachuted behind the Iron Curtain--probably betrayed by a Soviet mole in British or American intelligence. Then back to New Haven and the Divinity School followed by a year as chaplain at Andover and one at Williams College-where "two drunken 'Dekes'" fired a double-barreled shotgun into his living room after he denounced fraternities for excluding blacks and Jews. At that point President Griswold asked Coffin to come to New Haven and be "Yale's conscience."22

    The new chaplain provoked right wing outrage by his prominent role in the "freedom rides" challenging segregation and the oppression of black people In Mississippi and Alabama during 1961-62. President Griswold answered irate alumni by saying that Coffin was acting on "his convictions as a Christian and the promptings of his conscience as an ordained minister of his faith." He did not represent Yale, and was exercising a freedom guaranteed to all citizens. "Yale has taken no position In this matter." Griswold was a believer in institutional neutrality. Some alumni would not be assuaged. One wrote that Coffin's "effort to compel forced integration was only one of a series of events... all of which evidence sympathy with the programs of communist Russia in the United States."23

    The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a victory for racial justice, make it easier for Coffin in 1965 to refocus his moral energy on the escalating war in Vietnam. His first step was to take a lead in organizing the National Emergency Committee of Clergy Concerned about Viet Nam (the name was later changed to Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Viet Nam). Non-violent civil disobedience to the segregationist laws of Alabama and Mississippi had worked because the laws were blatantly unconstitutional and the Federal government was on the side of the protestors. Now Coffin said would employ civil disobedience only with misgiving because of the difference between challenging the blatantly unconstitutional laws of segregation and defying the full power of the United States government in the conduct of foreign policy.24

    In 1966 Coffin took on President Brewster for his criticism of Lynd, asking "is it proper for you to take a stand on another man's words and deeds without taking a stand on the situation that prompts them? And if the situation is as serious as many of us believe, then the epithets of an assistant professor may not be as reckless as the silence of university presidents." A less tolerant and open-minded president than Brewster would have quickly rid himself and the University of this troublesome priest. Instead Brewster replied that he was particularly incensed by Lynd's comparison of the American government with the Nazis. "When a member of our faculty has achieved notorious public identification with this University, I have no hesitation in letting the public know it if I believe his manner and style seem unfitting for his calling." And as for

my silence about the war .... This is simply because I have not had a confident notion about what I would do tomorrow morning at nine o'clock if I had the responsibility for United States policy. Until I do have such a confident notion, I do not find it appealing simply to say that the war is horrible or that peace is desirable .... In fact to pretend that ends without means constitute a position seems to me bad teaching and bad spokesmanship.25

As the war intensified Coffin became ever more troublesome to Brewster, although the two never reached the point where they could not discuss their differences. Increasingly during 1967 Coffin concentrated on preaching civil disobedience and supported the young men who turned in their draft cards. When in October Coffin raised the possibility of declaring Battell Chapel a sanctuary for resisters or the site of a large demonstration of civil disobedience,  Brewster said no, vehemently no, and called the chaplain before the Yale Corporation. The result was a slap so hard that a less confident man than Coffin would have resigned. Brewster told Coffin that the chapel was university property and thus under control of the Yale Corporation; as chaplain Coffin was a university employee directly responsible to the President and Corporation; and in his role pastor of the Church of Christ at Yale he was responsible to the senior deacons. Brewster wrote:

The administration of Yale University, and most of the Yale alumni (particularly the Eastern alumni) heartily endorse the international approach of our administration in Washington whereby we will become involved in most any difficulty which appears anywhere in the world .... The corollary of this national policy must certainly be a strong national military establishment .... one of the critical items in our military establishment is the development of reserve officers. In peace time these must largely be obtained from our educational institutions. Yale, therefore, has an obligation to support generously Its ROTC program.

The committee urged that a high Yale official be assigned responsibility for ROTC and related matters.50 Reuben A. Holden, assistant to the president and soon to be Secretary of the University, became the man, serving as Yale's representative on an advisory panel to the Defense Department. Ben Holden, an army colonel during World War II, would fight until the end to keep ROTC at Yale.

    The peak of enrollment in the ROTC programs came during and immediately after the Korean war when every Yale undergraduate in good physical shape assumed he would have to serve in the military. Most preferred to become an officer rather than be drafted as an enlisted man. ROTC was a fact of college life and not a problem and while the likelihood of being drafted remained high. Two years as a peacetime lieutenant in Germany or as an ensign sailing along the coast of Asia was not bad duty.

    Then the climate began to change. In his presidential inaugural of April 1964 Kingman made a proposal: "If the Peace Corps is the best national outlet for the larger active purposes of the oncoming generation, perhaps it should be given no less academic house room than military and naval training. Lest zeal be squeezed out of the academic process, we might well establish a Peace Reserve Training Corps."51 At that time there were around 20,000 American military "advisers" in Vietnam. One year later Yale College Dean Georges May, no radical, was worried by faculty comments in the course of study committee. He told the professors that neither the committee nor the faculty had any jurisdiction over the agreements on ROTC between Yale and the Department of Defense, but only over the content of courses for which credit was given. "But," he wrote to Brewster, "the line is a thin one, and I would not care to have to report to you in the future that the Committee wishes to discontinue giving credit to courses in Military and Naval Science." May also told Ben Holden that reform was necessary to enable "our undergraduates to earn a reserve commission, if they so wish, without seriously damaging the integrity of their academic programs."52 Nothing happened.

    By 1967 radical anti-war students throughout the country were attacking ROTC as evidence of institutional complicity with immoral aggression. Radicals at Yale were slow to get organized, but in October 1967 the Yale Chapter of the SDS demanded that the University eliminate the Army and Navy programs and sever all connections with the U.S. military establishment. SDS supported its manifesto with a day of picketing outside the ROTC buildings. The first months of 1968 were the most violent of the Vietnam war. The Vietcong and North Vietnamese attacked with the Tet offensive in February. General William Westmoreland, commander of US forces, asked President Johnson for another 200,000 troops--above the more than 500,000 already in Vietnam.

    Only then did the course of study committee begin a serious review of ROM "The issue of credit for ROTC courses," said committee chairman William Kessen, "is an academic curricular matter with no implications for national policy."53 The purely academic goal was to identify and remove credit from "how-to" courses, such as photography for beginners. When committee actually looked at course manual it found an almost total emphasis on memorization of procedures and no call for critical thinking. Another issue was that the recent reduction of the number of semester courses required for graduation from 40 to 36 had the effect of increasing the percentage of overall graduation credits occupied by ROM.  A third issue was elitist. The Yale ROTC programs were open to students from the University of New Haven and Southern Connecticut University. How, wondered the Yale faculty, could courses geared to such students be worthy of Yale men?  Also, the possible elimination of academic credit for ROTC courses led the course of study committee to a logical argument for ending the anomaly of military officers with professorial rank. If they were no longer teaching courses in the curriculum, they need no longer to be faculty.

    In November 1968 the Harvard equivalent of the course of study committee stole a march on Yale by recommending the elimination of credit for ROTC courses. Harvard's action energized the opponents of ROTC at Yale. The SDS announced it was organizing a student movement to oust ROTC. Professor John P. Trinkaus, master of Branford College and vocal supporter of the left, joined the attack. "Much of the philosophy of the military runs counter to that of a university, and, besides, low-level trade school courses have no place at Yale."54 Reuben Holden, writing as Secretary of the University, answered the critics by saying "that students in a free society ought to have the choice of taking military courses if they wish .... To deny this freedom is to deny a basic academic freedom which students and faculty groups demand on every campus I know of."55 Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation briefed the advisory panel to which Holden belonged on the "dissident activities of the New Left" and the Department of Defense asked FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to provide more information to the panel on "individuals and groups who are having disruptive and harmful effects on the ROTC on our campuses."56

    In January 1969 the course of study committee recommended to the full faculty that ROTC courses "be given extra-curricular status without academic credit", that officers of the ROTC units no longer be designated as members of the faculty, and that the President and Fellows of the Corporation be requested to "initiate early negotiations with the Department of Defense" to effect these changes. The faculty approved the recommendations by a four to one margin and also asked the president to appoint an ad hoc committee to examine and report on all aspects of ROTC, because the course of study committee's mandate dealt only with the issues of credit and faculty rank for military officers. Not all faculty agreed. One voted against the resolution because it meant yielding to political pressure and abandoning "the responsibility we have for the education of the armed forces." Another challenged the idea that the military courses were too vocational, when compared with what the faculty had approved in the new seminars in the residential colleges. A third said that a politically motivated action might be a violation of academic freedom.57

    In February 1969 the Yale Corporation instructed the president to negotiate with the government in order to give effect to the faculty resolution. Brewster, however, went out of his way to stress that the faculty and the Corporation wanted to keep ROTC at Yale. Whatever might be done with respect to academic credit, he said, reserve training is not only an important opportunity for students, but hopefully an important contribution to the quality of the armed services. They ... need to have a fair contribution from our best educated young men."58

     The occupation by Harvard students of University Hall and the ensuing violence on April 9 alarmed the Yale administration, excited student radicals, and was followed by a month of political theater. A tumultuous Yale College faculty meeting on April 24 requested the President to call an open meeting of the Yale community as soon as possible to discuss ROM.  Brewster welcomed the idea. Since 1965 he and his aides had been closely following and trying to learn from the disturbances at the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard. He concluded that the best course called for candor In criticizing those with whom he disagreed such as Bill Coffin combined with giving students the fullest possible opportunity to speak out Thus, he called the SDS "Students to Destroy Society .... revolutionaries ... wanting to destroy social life as it exists today .... the worst thing about the revolutionary is that he turns all the rest of us into counter- revolutionaries."59 But he would always listen carefully--to anyone. And he believed that the use of police against dissent almost always made matters worse. The meeting took place in Ingalls Hockey Rink on May 1 with nearly 4000 students, faculty, and others including the majority of the Yale Corporation. The climax was a vote on whether the University to sever all connection with ROTC. The result was 1286 in favor, 1286 opposed. It truly was. The crowd laughed and the meeting adjourned. The next day the College faculty endorsed the recommendations of the ad hoc committee on ROTC appointed by Brewster. In addition to ending credit for ROTC courses and faculty status for officers students in ROTC must not be prohibited from majoring in certain subjects (the military barred anthropology, art, drama, music, and religion) and should be allowed to resign from ROTC at any time without penalty (separation in 1969 often led to immediate induction into the service as an enlisted man). Also, the government should pay the full cost of the program (Yale at the time provided space without charge).60

    The Corporation on May 3 endorsed the faculty action. Yale negotiated for a few months with the two services, but the gap between Yale's conditions and what the services would accept was too wide. ROTC came to an end as it did in many private universities. Had the services agreed to continue on an extra-curricular basis would the agitation against ROTC have ended? Probably not.

The Conversion of Kingman Brewster, Jr.

    When it came to the Vietnam war, Kingman Brewster, as we have seen, tried to balance academic freedom as he understood it with the need to listen to the opponents of dissent as well as to the dissenters. He deplored civil disobedience and on several occasions came close to saying that a professor and a chaplain who engaged in disobedience forfeited the right to be associated with the university. He was troubled by the war, but through 1967 and into 1968 he saw no better alternative for the United States than staying the course. For a long time he accepted the White House line about maintaining credibility lest a foe miscalculate and there be nuclear war. For example, in declining in 1967 to participate in a "Convocation on the National Crisis", he said "I hope I am no less sensitive to the horrors of the present war and the great danger to civilization which it entails. Thus far, however, the alternatives proposed seem to me to increase the risk of ultimate nuclear holocaust."61 He said often that he would not criticize until that day when, imagining himself President of the United States, he knew confidently what else to do. Kingman Brewster was an honest but not a humble man.

    He repeatedly invoked the liturgy of institutional neutrality and said that individuals at Yale had the right to express controversial opinions but spoke only for themselves, never for the university. Through 1968 he hoped that there might be a negotiated end of the war as the closing achievement of President Johnson (who had withdrawn as a candidate for re-election in March in order to concentrate on a solution). But the administration of Richard M. Nixon did not bring peace any closer In 1969. Brewster was angered by what he saw as Nixon's deliberate disregard of dissent and discouragement of "open critical discussion."

    Brewster's test came in the autumn of 1969. Students, faculty, and local citizens were planning New Haven's and Yale's role in a nationwide "moratorium" in opposition to the war scheduled for October 1st.. The organizers asked that Yale be closed for the day. Brewster read to the Yale College faculty a statement he was about to issue:

I recognize and personally sympathize with the widespread and deeply felt concern about the prolongation of the war in Vietnam.... In my official capacity, however, I cannot give positive University sanction to the interruption of normal educational activities. Yale should not forfeit its institutional neutrality for a political cause, no matter how widely backed.

However, he would encourage faculty and supervisors to make special arrangements with students and workers "as long as the educational and other functions of the place are not unduly hampered." Some faculty agreed. If Yale takes a political position, said Professor of Chemistry Harold Cassidy, it will suffer the fate of European universities. Others said the war was too great an evil to permit neutrality. Art historian Vincent Scully, a prominent opponent of the war, said the University must take a stand against what it knows to be evil.62

    President Brewster issued his statement on institutional neutrality and said he would speak at the moratorium in his personal capacity, not as a spokesman for Yale. Law Professor Eugene V. Rostow--who had served as Under Secretary of State In the Johnson administration and with his brother Walt was a mid-level architect of Vietnam policy from 1966 to 1969--plead with Brewster not to advocate withdrawal in defeat. "Our educational system, and our national experience, give few Americans a disciplined view of the hard problems of peace and war In their setting of history." We must not abandon the people of Vietnam. We can not regain "the effortless security of the nineteenth century .... A balance of power is the only conceivable foundation for peace."63 Rostow was almost the last voice at Yale to believe the Vietnam war as a necessary continuation of American efforts to thwart Hitler in World War II and Stalin in the Cold War. Brewster's assistant Alfred B. Fitt, recently hired after being in charge of ROTC affairs In the Defense Department, disagreed vehemently with Rostow and offered his own suggestions for what Brewster might say at the moratorium:

what does it take for people like Rostow to recognize a national catastrophe when they see it, and what does it take for them to realize that what we are sacrificing in Vietnam are the lives of men, women and children? Older men can comfortably send younger men off to their deaths when an identifiable national interest is present, but I happen to be one older man who thinks that the young men of this country do not owe their lives for the preservation of the Thieu and Ky government.64

I took the considered risk of speaking my mind on issues such as the war and the draft and the legal harassment of black revolutionaries. These were matters which racked the entire university community. My decision was not a simple self- indulgence of my right of free speech. It was the result of a deliberate balance of judgment about what degree of speaking out was best for the University under the circumstances: how to avoid excessive exploitation of the presidential office, and how to avoid being a moral eunuch on a morally anguished campus.67