They Marched Into Sunlight (88 page)

Terry Allen Sr. was a skilled polo player:
Ints. Consuelo Allen, February 2, 2001; Albert Schwartz, February 4, 2001;
El Paso Times Sunday Magazine,
February 21, 1965; “Cavalryman versus Cowboy,”
True West,
September–October 1965. The
True West
article repeated an incident from the race first reported in the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
of December 21, 1922: “The Major had stopped in a restaurant for breakfast and had ordered bacon and eggs. While waiting for the cook to fill the order, the old gentleman proprietor of the restaurant stopped at the Major’s table and remarked that the race between a soldier and a cowboy was surely on the lips of half the country. ‘’Course,’ he drawled, ‘Major Allen don’t have a chance to beat Key Dunne. That cowboy will wear out the Army officer; he’s too strong for him. That Army horse hasn’t a chance to stick it out with a mustang in a 300-mile race.’

“‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Major Allen replied. ‘I can’t say as to the outcome of the race yet, but I’m Major Allen and I’m out in front at the present time and still in good condition. Up to the present, the joke is on you, so hurry on with the ham and eggs.’

“‘The joke is not only on me,’ replied the restaurant owner, with a chuckle, ‘but the ham and eggs as well.’”

From the war zone in Europe in 1945:
Terry Allen Sr. letter to Charles Meurisse and Co., Chicago, April 4, 1945, UTEP.

“I have avoided seeking political influence”:
Terry Allen Sr. letter to Capt. Reese Cleveland, September 17, 1944, UTEP; letter to Alfred P. Wechsler, October 4, 1944, UTEP.

As a cadet in Company H-1: Howitzer
yearbook, 1952; Assembly, December 1975; Red Blaik letter to Mrs. Terry Allen, January 21, 1949, Allen family papers.

Terry Sr. was watching his son’s progress:
John C. Schuller letter to Terry Allen Sr., December 20, 1955, UTEP.

and then was sent west to Colorado Springs:
Ints. Bebe and Bill Coonly, February 2, 2001.

General Allen and Mary Fran lived:
Ints. Conseulo Allen, February 2, 2001; Bebe and Bill Coonly, February 2, 2001; Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001;
El Paso Times,
February 2, 1965.

Always on the lookout to help his son:
Terry Allen Sr. letter to Major Gen. R. W. Porter, September 1965, Allen family papers;
El Paso Times,
October 1, 3, 8, 1961.

After a honeymoon on the Riviera:
Int. Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001; Jean Allen letter to Mary Frances Allen, September 12, 1962, Allen family papers.

“Your considered counsel has always been”:
Terry Allen Jr. letter to father, September 3, 1963, Allen family papers.

Out of whimsy and desperation:
Int. Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001.

Holding on dearly to reminders:
Ints. Consuelo Allen, February 2, 2001; Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001; Albert Schwartz, February 3, 2001.

“I was thrilled to receive three letters”:
Terry Allen Jr. letter to wife Jean, March 25, 1967, Allen family papers.

How different that world:
Int. Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001.

“This is for all the women”:
Int. Consuelo Allen, February 2, 2001.

“A very special place”: The Officer’s Guide,
1967–68 edition, 104.

She struck up a relationship:
Int. Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001.

He drove over to 5014 Timberwolf:
Ints. Bebe and Bill Coonly, February 2, 2001; Consuelo Allen, February 2, 2001; Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001.

Tad Smith was not a divorce lawyer:
Int. Tad Smith, December 12, 2001.

“You can’t leave!”:
Ints. Consuelo Allen, February 2, 2001; Jean Ponder Allen Soto, February 3, 2001.

Chapter 5: Song of Napalm

On the Sunday morning of March 12, 1967:
Int. E. N. Brandt, April 12, 2001; internal Dow document from W. H. Coffey to Dr. A. P. Beutel, “Napalm Meeting with Department of Defense Officials,” March 9, 1967, PSA.

Dow Chemical was not one of the big boys:
Department of Defense contractors list, 1967; ints. E. N. Brandt, April 12, 2001; Herbert Doan, April 12, 2001; Dave Coslett, April 26, 2001; Bill Seward, April 27, 2001; Ray Rolf, May 1, 2001; name file, Dow Chemical Co., LBJ. “Dear Jimmy, I have on the handsome tie you sent me,” Johnson aide Walter W. Jenkins wrote to Dow’s Jimmy Phillips. “I want you to know how proud I am of it. Many thanks, my friend, for thinking of me.”

Napalm was cheap and easy to make:
E. N. Brandt,
Growth Company
(Michigan State University Presss, 1967), 351–70; ints. Herbert Doan, April 12, 2001; E. N. Brandt, April 12, 2001.

Dow in turn became the most visible target:
Dow internal document, 1967 list of campus protests, PSA; Brandt,
Public Relations Journal,
July 1968.

“the ‘Merchants of Death’ label”:
J. J. Boddie internal memorandum, December 12, 1966, PSA.

Before then, as Brandt once explained:
Brandt,
Public Relations Journal,
July 1968. Also
NYT,
March 11, 1967, 17.

The
Ramparts
piece:
Pepper, “The Children of Vietnam,”
Ramparts,
January 1967. The preface was written by Dr. Benjamin Spock.

Pepper’s base number of 415,000 civilian deaths:
Langguth,
Our Vietnam,
622. “Civilian casualties were impossible to estimate,” Langguth wrote, describing the situation at the time of the Paris Peace Talks in 1973. “They may have run to a million men, women and children.” Also Summers,
Vietnam War Almanac,
112: “Further estimates are that some 300,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war. Additionally, North Vietnamese civilian deaths from American bombing totaled some 65,000. These statistics on civilian casualties are a matter of considerable controversy and the true numbers will probably never be known.”
Impact of the Vietnam War,
United States Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, 1971. In the introduction, the report states that “the survey spells out the casualty figures…over a million civilian casualties in South Vietnam”;
CBS Evening News
interview, May 12, 1967, with physician members of Committee of Responsibility.

veteran War correspondent Martha Gellhorn: Ladies’ Home Journal,
January 1967, republished in
Reporting Vietnam,
Part One, 1998.

When Ned Brandt and two associates:
Int. E. N. Brandt, April 12, 13, 2001.

“Dear Mr. Doan”:
Letter written for Robert S. McNamara by Dow public relations department, published in newspapers in December 1967, PSA.

Chapter 6: Madison, Wisconsin

The 1967 fall term: Daily Cardinal,
October 4, 1967;
Wisconsin State Journal,
October 5, 1967; Letters of Betty Menacher, September–October 1967;
Capital Times,
October 1–15, 1967.

There were 5,385 freshmen: Characteristics of 1967 Freshman Class,
UW Registrar records;
Wisconsin Alumnus
magazine, vol. 69, December 1967.

“Our image, Arlie”:
Harrington letter to Mucks, March 6, 1967, UW, box 57.

Otto Festge, Madison’s liberal mayor:
Int. Otto Festge, July 6, 2001.

On the night of May 15, 1935: Scotton Report on the Anti-Dow Protests,
December 1967: Journalist James W. Scotton was commissioned by the University of Wisconsin News and Publication Service to answer questions raised by the Dow demonstration. His report, a model of evenhandedness, placed the 1967 protest in the context of dissent on campus, going back to the 1930s.

Jane Brotman, after graduating:
Ints. Jane Brotman, January 24, 2001, April 9, 2002.

her father, a lumber salesman:
Ints. Betty Menacher, April 27, 2001, April 8, 2002.

“We ended up lost in Chinatown”:
Menacher letter to Mary Mahaney, June 23, 1967.

“Lately everyone has been stealing food”:
Menacher letters to Mary Mahaney, August 16–20, 1967.

Betty was Catholic but:
Ints. Betty Menacher, April 27, 2001, April 8, 2002.

“Do you ever have panty raids?”:
Menacher letter to Mary Mahaney, October 7, 1967.

Jane Beth Brotman followed a well-worn path:
Ints. Jane Brotman, January 24, 2001, April 9, 2002.

Chapter 7: Soglin’s Thrill

The lead editorial: Daily Cardinal,
September 28, 1967. Soglin’s career as a columnist lasted less than a year.

Their latest intellectual forum was
Connections: The first sixties-style underground paper in Madison,
Connections
had begun publication the previous spring. Copies are archived at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, which has a vast collection of alternative newspapers, shepherded by the leading expert on that genre, James Danky.

Boston, Tampa, Buffalo, Cincinnati:
Warren Christopher papers, Urban Riots, August 11, 1967, LBJ.

Many students who had headed south:
The graduate schools at Wisconsin were bubbling with students who had been active in the civil rights movement. Bob Gabriner, the editor of
Connections
and a graduate student in history, had spent several summers organizing voting drives in rural western Tennessee. He made a return trip through the South in the summer of 1967 with his wife, Vicki Gabriner, recording oral histories of rural and otherwise unknown and unrecognized black civil rights participants. By the end of that summer, Gabriner said, he felt that the Black Power movement was pushing him away, so he turned more of his attention to the war.

All summer long, a rumor had spread:
Int. Robert Swacker, May 2, 2002;
Crisis,
newsletter of the Committee to End the War in Vietnam, vol. IV, no. 1, September 11, 2002.

The military was not an institution:
Ints. Paul Soglin, June 22, 2001, August 3, 2001, April 10, 2001.

aboard the SS
Patricia: List or Manifest of Alien Passengers for the United States Immigration Officer at Port of Arrival. Required by the regulations of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor of the United States under Act of Congress approved February 20, 1907. S.S. Patricia sailing from Hamburg November 8th 1912. Also, S.S. Patricia sailing from Hamburg June 2, arriving Port of New York June 16, 1905, Soglin papers.

Paul’s father, Albert Soglin:
Descriptions of Soglin’s early life from ints. Paul Soglin, June 22, 2001, August 3, 2001, April 10, 2002. Also
Paul Soglin, Former UW Student,
UW Oral History Project, interview by Laura Smail, December 21, 1977. In the late 1970s Smail conducted first-rate interviews with key figures of the antiwar years on campus, including most UW administrators and some student leaders; unpublished Soglin memoir, Soglin papers.

An editorial in the
Cardinal:
Daily Cardinal,
October 19, 1963.

He gradually switched his concentration:
Int. Paul Soglin, August 3, 2001; Mosse,
Confronting History,
150–70;
History Digest,
January 1970; Williams,
America in Vietnam,
1985; William Appleman Williams,
Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society;
William Appleman Williams letter to George Mosse, January 13, 1969, UW. Williams had left Madison for Oregon State. He had finished the manuscript of
Roots of the Modern American Empire,
as he told his former colleague Mosse: “I managed to finish the big book on the agricultural businessmen just as school started, and Random House is now inching it through the production process. It is big, some 800 typescript with footnotes, so it won’t be out till summer or early fall. I cast it very largely in terms of the development and shaping of social consciousness in a marketplace society, trying to show how the metropolis and the country came to a consensus on imperial marketplace expansion as a way of resolving economic and political difficulties. I think you will enjoy it a good bit.” For Mosse lecture on cemeteries, Mosse papers, UW.

“One cannot understand one’s own history”:
Mosse,
Confronting History,
171–86.

The “one rule,” Soglin recalled:
Soglin interview, UW Oral History Project; also Soglin ints. with author, August 3, 2001, April 10, 2002.

It was the draft that provoked:
Ints. Jim Rowen, April 8, 2002; Paul Soglin, April 10, 2002; Robert Swacker, May 2, 2002; William Kaplan, March 28, 2001; Bob Gabriner, May 31, 2002; Evan Stark, July 16, 2002; Morris Edelson, May 10, 2002. Also transcript of Soglin interview,
The War at Home
papers, SHSW.

“Please excuse the way”:
Soglin letter to Harrington and response, Harrington file, UW.

When the Dow Chemical Company visited: Capital Times,
February 18–24, 1967;
WSJ,
February 17–25, 1967;
Daily Cardinal,
February 20–25, 1967; transcript of interview with Henry Haslach,
The War at Home
papers, SHSW; Ints. Paul Soglin, August 3, 2001; Art Hove, June 20, 2001; Joe Kauffman, June 19, 2001; Jack Cipperly, June 19, 2001; Ralph Hanson family papers; Robben Fleming papers, UW.

“After the thing had kind of broke down”: Paul Soglin, Former UW Student,
UW Oral History Project interview, December 21, 1977.