Outrage And Rebellion -- `Boomers' Bring Battle Of Vietnam To American Soil - And A Counterculture Is Born

THE SIXTIES AGE OF UNREST, PART 1

U.S. involvement in Vietnam began quietly enough, one of many similar Cold War adventures. In the early 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency aided the French struggle to retain control of Vietnam against Ho Chi Minh's Vietminh guerrillas. By 1956, the French had given up and Vietnam was partitioned; by 1960, the Vietminh had reorganized as the Viet Cong or National Liberation Front.

In early 1961, about 700 Americans were stationed in South Vietnam; two years later, there were more than 16,000. By 1965, 185,000 American troops were there.

Meanwhile, the leading edge of the baby boom hit adolescence. Their parents proudly beckoned them to the future - the college degree and corporate ascent, marriage and a family, the split-level and station wagon. But many American children of affluence rebelled against their own privilege and their parents' values.

To the boomers, American society seemed sick. As young people matured in the 1960s, they joined or created their own political protest, and invented a counterculture. Their coming of age briefly brought together American kids from many races, from every class who shared nothing but their youth and their outrage. And a smattering of idealism.

In the national 1969 Mobilization against the Vietnam war, Seattle's march organizers quixotically urged the demonstrators to carry paper flowers and "engage shoppers in Westlake Mall in discussions about the war and repression." Radical Weathermen sneered, "Dig it. For us, this isn't a peace march, it's a war march . . . Look for the Viet Cong flag. The time has come to Bring the War Home to Seattle."

And to the University of Washington, that "most deadly machine," as a Radical Youth Movement mimeo described the school.

At the UW, calls to discontinue academic credit for the Reserve Officers Training Corps were followed by demands to oust the program from campus. Likewise, recruiters from Weyerhaeuser - "who rape the land with chainsaws" - and the Dow Chemical Co. - "murderous war profiteers" - were blocked by protesters at the Loew Hall Placement Center.

In March 1970, the UW Black Student Union, joined by the Seattle Liberation Front, the Weathermen and hundreds of unaffiliated students, protested the U's ongoing athletic relationship with Brigham Young University. Claiming that the Mormon Church "ran" BYU and that the Church advocated white supremacy, BSU called on the university to sever a relationship that sanctioned those policies.

A rally of about 1,000 students sent a delegation to Executive Vice President John Hogness with their demands, but he told them that a decision was four or five weeks away. Frustration boiled into violence.

Around 200 chanting demonstrators invaded the Old Quad, leaving a trail of damage. But many thousands of students who fully supported the BSU cause were unwilling to pass beyond rallies and teach-ins to civil disobedience, let alone violence. The invasion of Cambodia and open war on student protesters would change that.

On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered an assault into neutral Cambodia to cut supply lines to Viet Cong guerrillas. Protest against broadening the war rocked nearly every campus. A graduate student working in UW's Thomson Hall surprised an arsonist who calmly confessed to campus police that he hoped to set the building ablaze as a protest against the U.S. action.

That Sunday, Ohio's governor sent National Guard troops to control protests at Kent State University. Within 24 hours, four students lay dead of gunshot wounds.

On Tuesday, May 5, 1970, the University of Washington Daily announced that a strike had begun to honor the dead and bring home the living. No more business as usual; it was time to shut the place down and work to end the war. That day, 5,000 students "took the freeway," headed for downtown; next day, 10,000 kids marched from campus to downtown, joined along the way by hundreds of Seattle residents.

On campus, the Strike Coalition took over the old Physics Annex, and set up a mimeograph machine and a daycare program. Radicals made fitful attempts to barricade campus entrances, occupy buildings and establish a Free University. KUOW was liberated as Radio Free Seattle, and strike organizers demanded an end to war-related research on campus.

The Times angered conservative readers who quickly grew "sick and tired" of lavish coverage of the UW Strike - largely written by Don Hannula and Richard Larsen - including dozens of photos and interviews with student leaders. But the paper's editorial voice deplored violence and disrespect and upheld patience and restraint, urging student demonstrators to come to their senses and return to class at once.

But across the nation, the state of siege continued. On May 15, highway patrolmen shot to death two black students in their dorm at Mississipi's Jackson State University. "It is," wrote one organizer in bitter exultation, "open season on us all."

But by February 1971, a UW rally to protest the spread of the war into Laos was marked by heckling and bickering. The center couldn't hold, and the coalition fell apart.

Nonetheless, America had undergone a vast change. The '60s were made by middle-class kids who had grown up with hula hoops and big, finned cars. Critics said the decade was only about sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. But it was much more.

While not all young people were radicalized, nearly all were sensitized to the issues that radicals raised. The anti-war coalition brought together supporters for the United Farm Workers grape boycott, Radical Women and Earth Day organizers. The movement forced attention to the disproportionate number of poor young men of color who were fighting the war in Asia - and dying there. Most of all, the youth culture and protest movement insisted on the need for an ethical, humane basis for the American way at home and abroad. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Historians Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy teach at local universities and do research, writing and oral history. Original newspaper graphics courtesy of the Seattle Public Library.

----------------------------------------------------------------- 1963 Harvard University fires psychology professor Timothy Leary for encouraging his students to "tune in, turn on and drop out" with LSD.

1965 41 percent of the American population is under the age of 20.

1967 The first Human Be-In at Golden Gate Park provides American newspaper readers with photos of 20,000 "flower children," beaded and belled, stoned and smiling, dancing to acid rock.

1968 In August, thousands of anti-war demonstrators, at war with mayor Richard Daley's police, throng Chicago's streets during the Democratic National Convention.

Eldridge Cleaver, education minister of the Black Panther party for Self-Defense, unsuccessfully runs for the U.S. presidency.

U.S. troops and support personnel crest at 540,000 in Vietnam.

1969 In August, nearly 500,000 kids converge on Max Yasgur's farm in Woodstock, N.Y., for three days. Among the dozens of music legends playing are the Jefferson Air plane, Grateful Dead, Santana and Seattle's Jimi Hendrix.

John Filo: 1970 On May 4, National Guardsmen shoot to death four Kent State University students protesting the escalation of the war in Southeast Asia.