Wisconsin Public Television University Place Sunlight Project and Symposium  David Maraniss Into Sunlight  March 25, 2011 UP572     cc >> Norma Saldivar: Good evening. Thank you so much for being with us this evening. It's my distinct pleasure to introduce this evening's Hilldale Lecturer. The Hilldale Lecture Series was inaugurated in 1973, and is sponsored by the four divisional committees of the faculty. Through the Hilldale Lecture Series, we are given the opportunity to hear from distinguished thinkers who have contributed to contemporary culture and science, and have received international recognition and acclaim. This evening's guest is most definitely a man of distinction, and undeniably worthy to be with us tonight as the Hilldale Lecturer. A journalist and writer, our guest began his distinguished career here in Madison as a true cub reporter while still in high school, reporting on the local war protests. He is currently Associate Editor at the Washington Post, where he has worked since 1977. In 1993, he won his first Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, for his work on the life and times of Bill Clinton. In 2008, he was part of the team of reporters who won the Pulitzer for coverage of the Virginia Tech tragedy. 

That same year, the 2008 Pulitzer Gold Medal Award went to the team reporting on Walter Reed Medical Center, for which he served as editor. In addition, he has been a Pulitzer finalist twice for his achievements in journalism and then again for his book, They Marched Into Sunlight, the inspiration for the Sunlight Project and Symposium. Tonight's distinguished guest has also written on a variety of subjects, which include critically acclaimed and best selling books, First in his Class, a biography about Bill Clinton; Rome 1960: When the World Stirred at the Summer Olympics; Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero; and When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi, which incidentally, has been adapted to the stage and opened this past October on Broadway at Circle in the Square Theater, starring Dan Lauria and Judith Light. His latest book released in January is an anthology of his newspaper articles entitled Into the Story: A Writer's Journey Through Life, Politics, Sports and Loss. His current work is a multi-generational biography of Barack Obama entitled Out of This World, to be published in 2012. Our guest is a fellow of a Society of American Historians. He's the son of a newspaper editor, a husband to environmentalist Linda, father to Andre and Sarah, grandfather to Heidi and Eva, and a resident of Washington, DC, and his hometown Madison, Wisconsin. He's a man of distinction who's written works of great detail, revelation, depth and humanity. In reading his writing, and then meeting our guest, I'm reminded of a wonderful quote by the great American playwright Tennessee Williams, who once said, "If the writing is honest, it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it." Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to present to you, this evening's Hilldale Lecturer, David Maraniss. [APPLAUSE]  >> David Maraniss: Thank you, Norma, Andrew and all of the people who made this conference possible, and the Memorial Union, of which I am now on the Board of Directors, largely because I used to hang out here and not go to class, and to Dean Sheehan, and everyone who made this possible. 

In Madison, again, we live in interesting times. I grew up here. So did my wife. We went to school here. We came back to do research for the book about which this conference is about, They Marched Into Sunlight, in 2001,  and realized that we could come home again. So we bought a house here and spend as much time as my work allows, and to be honest, as much time as the weather allows here. But Madison, as you all know, is a special place, really, unlike almost anywhere else in America. Part of it is the natural beauty. Part of it is the progressive tradition of this city and of this university. The sifting and winnowing in search of truth. 

And most of it really has to do with the people, who are incredibly startlingly friendly, first of all. When you come from Washington, my wife said that the first encounter she had when we landed on Wednesday was in the Women's room at the airport, where two women were in a fight over who was more sorry for whatever they were doing. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. And that's Madison. So it's startling friendliness, and intelligence, and a progressive political awareness that is always welcoming and uplifting to come back to, especially from Washington. I wish I'd been here a few weeks ago, during the uprising at the capitol. But even now, this is a fascinating time to be back, and to be here dealing with the subjects of our discussions, and our dances of these two days, which connect so interestingly to what's going on in the past. I emphasize these dances, because they're really want brought me here. 

You know, I'm honored to be able to speak and be called a Hilldale Lecturer, and I'm fascinated by the panel discussions that are going on. But it's the dance that really is where my heart is right now. Several years ago, a great choreographer and friend of mine named Robin Becker called me and said that she wanted to try to something with the book that she'd read, They Marched Into Sunlight. My standing joke is that all of my books are in various stages of not being made into movies. One of them actually is a play on Broadway right now, Lombardi, which is great fun. But of all the different possible art forms, there's something about modern dance, and a transformation of a book into dance that I just found fascinating and actually thrilling. I've been to several of the workshops of this particular dance in New York City at the 92nd Street Y. I have not seen Jin-Wen's dance yet, but I know that that will be fabulous, too. But all of this, and we're actually going to show one scene from Robin Becker's dance during my speech, because as I said, I'm not here to talk, I'm here to be part of this larger effort. One dance is really worth a thousand words, especially of my words. 

You know, in some ways, the Madison of today resonates with the Madison of 1967, the time of my book and of these dances. Both were years of intensifying public protest, of people standing up against powerful interests, challenging the government and corporate interests, questioning the morality and legality of an action. Then, it was the war in Vietnam. Now, it's the war against public workers, teachers. All public movements, all great movements, when you boil it down to the essence, they are a combination of at least two important things. One is idealism. And the other is self-interest. That's not putting self interest in a negative light, it's just what can drive people to these moments. You always wonder, when was Madison going to come back and be what it was in the 1960s. And unfortunately or fortunately in some ways, it took something of this magnitude. 

But when you look at any of the great movements in American history, and world history, but in America, you have the civil rights movement, the women's feminist movement. Around the world, the fall of  Eastern Europe, the revolutions that started spreading from Tunisia to Egypt and through the Middle East. All of these have that same combination, a yearning for freedom and idealism, and also a feeling of people that they're getting a raw deal, and that's the self-interest. In Madison, not only the combination of jobs, the value of real work, the worth of teachers and labor unions, questions about a society where a pair of billionaires can mettle with and try to undo the great progressive traditions of this state, what one of the great professors here, Bill Cronon, called a radical break from the progressive traditions of this state, what this state stands for. The combination in the '60s really was a yearning for peace, a distaste for this war, and also the self-interest was the draft. It's the largest difference, whenever you analyze what happened in Madison or around this country in the 1960s and the war in Vietnam, and what happened starting with the 1991 invasion of Iraq and then the wars of George W. Bush, was the draft. Every one of us, every guy my age, every girlfriend of someone my age, every mother and father, had to deal with, what is that person going to do. Am I going to oppose the war? Am I going to go to prison? Am I going to burn my draft card? Am I going to go? Am I going to try to get out of it some way? You know, join the International Guard, or eating my way out of it, or whatever. Every single person, and I didn't mean to make it flippant, because it was a very serious discussion. It was the fuel of that whole movement. 

So you shouldn't denigrate that notion of self-interest, because it can fuel idealism in very powerful ways. It touched everyone, because of that, in a way that it doesn't today. The soldiers who come home today, it'd be as though the 99.8% of society had no clue what they'd endured. There are many serious differences, of course, between then and now. And one of the interesting ones, which is a positive today, is that when you looked at the anti-war movement from the time of this book, one of the goals of so many people who were leading the movement, particularly on college campuses like Madison, was to try to spread it into the larger community. That was a constant discussion about how do you get people outside of this campus to see what's going on, and to be part of this. It was largely unsuccessful in many ways. Today, it's inherently successful. The coalition that's built in the last month or so, six weeks, in Wisconsin, it's fully joined. You have the fire fighters, the teachers, the laborers, the janitors, the students, the teaching assistants, and the professors, and people of all stripes being bound in this single cause. 

Then of course, part of the story of my book, which takes place on October 19, 1967, was the behavior of Madison police when they marched into the Commerce Building, now Ingraham Hall, stormed into that building wielding batons and bashing heads. Now, in this remarkable sensibility of today, you find mostly, the police at the state capitol, I wish I were there, but I've heard many reports that the police were neutral, or sympathetic, or would take off their uniforms and be part of it. So there was a wholly different sociological sensibility at work. When They Marched Into Sunlight came out in 2003, I would say that it was about a time when Americans were fighting and dying in a place where they didn't know the language or the culture, where they didn't know who was a friend or who was an enemy, they were fighting a war that was started under very questionable circumstances, and that no one seemed to know how to end. There were also these profound questions about the meaning of patriotism, and the role of dissent in American life. It was about Vietnam, that I was talking, but it had a very familiar ring, it echoes several years ago, unfortunately, as it still does today. My book and these dances are about war and peace. The book is a non-fiction account of two days in October, 1967, when the war was raging in Vietnam, and the anti-war movement was raging here at home. In Vietnam, a battalion of the First Infantry Division, the Black Lions Battalion, marched off into the jungle on what was called a search and destroy mission. The strategy of the war machine at that point was to search and destroy the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong and they'll win the war, just a battle of attrition. 

Go out and find them and kill them, and it's over. This battalion marched into the jungle 44 miles northwest of Saigon. Unknowingly marching into an ambush, 160 American soldiers, 1200 Viet Cong, the First Viet Cong Division. The men of that battalion saw the worst that man could do to man that day. Sixty of them were killed, the other 60 wounded in that single battle. At the same time, here at the University of Wisconsin, the Dow protest was underway against Dow Chemical Company, the makers of Napalm and Agent Orange, who came to the campus to recruit. In that protest, the sit down strike at the Commerce building turned into the first violent confrontation on a college campus of the Vietnam War, when the police went in there and essentially started their own riot. And in Washington at that very moment, Lyndon Johnson had no clue how to deal with the war or the antiwar. At the very moment, there's a 12-hour time difference between Vietnam and Washington, DC, it was 8:30 in the morning in Vietnam when this battalion left their night perimeter, their base camp, and marched into the jungle, largely to their deaths. It was 8:30 at night, the previous night, in Washington. 

Johnson was meeting with his war council and turned to his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, and uttered the words, "How are we ever going to win?"  Those are the specifics of the story, much of which is conveyed in these dances. But the themes are really what drive my book, and what energized Robin's amazing dance and Jin-Wen's dance, as well. As different as these soldiers and students were, young protesters, on the surface, really more bound them together than separated them. It's the commonality of the human experience that the dances evoke, and that fascinate me and are at the core of my book. The fears, the questions, people facing the unknown. Young soldiers and young protesters, not equivalent in terms of the consequences of what might happen to them that day, but equivalent in terms of the choices they had to make. What do you do? Whom do you trust? What are the consequences of your actions? Where's the line drawn between self preservation and virtue? Heading off to the unknown. Young versus old. The young being betrayed by the old. Brother versus brother. 

Love and hate. The meaning of loyalty and patriotism. And the eternal sorrow of war.  § §  (applause)  >> That's Joe and Yoko from Robin Becker's amazing dance troupe. Thank you. (applause)  Dance, obviously, is an expression of the body. It's the language. Body is a language. Robin and I both, I mean, I'm not a choreographer. It'd be laughable to see me try to dance. 

But we share this common view that the issues of war and peace can be told so powerfully in terms of the body. And when you think about it in so many ways, I mean, think of the images that stick in your mind, that are etched in your mind. That naked girl running from the napalm in Vietnam, the body. In my book, the story that haunts me the most is a very little story of a kid named Tom Coburn, the youngest member of the Black Lions Battalion, 17 years old. So skinny that he could hide behind a rubber tree about this thick. In the midst of that battle, there were Viet Cong up in the trees, tied up into the trees. And Tom Coburn had found a moment of safety underneath the tree. And five yards away was one of his comrades, who was being shot at. Tom Coburn had to deal with what to do. Should he go out there and try to save that comrade and get killed himself, or should he try to preserve himself? He's only 17 years old. 

It's an unfair question to put to any human being, and especially a 17-year-old kid in a strange country fighting for he knows not what. Coburn stayed where he was, didn't move. It's haunted him his entire life. When I first called him to interview him for my book, he was living in Pontiac, Michigan. I told him that I was trying to talk to every soldier from that battalion who had survived the battle. About 20 seconds into what I was saying, he started crying and said, "I can't talk." This was 28 years after the battle. So I marked down his name and remembered that I would try to reach him again, because there must be some story there. Finally, three years later, there was a reunion of the soldiers, coming together largely because I had found them and brought them together. Tom Coburn came to that reunion out in Las Vegas. The body. 

He said he was ready to talk to me, that he trusted me. All of the soldiers had told him to talk to me. And he started telling me that story that I just told you about that moment when he froze, and how all of these years after that, any time he was in any situation where he heard a loud noise, it would freak him out, and he couldn't hold jobs because of that, and people would make fun of him. And when he had a job in a moving company, some young kids who worked there, punks, would just make loud noises on purpose to watch him run away. He was telling me this story, and telling me of being under that tree, and not being able to move. He was holding a glass of water and the glass started shaking more and more, until it spilled all over his body while I was talking to him. That's the impact of war. The body. When my wife Linda and I went to Illinois, as we were doing the research, we went to a place the Peace Hospital, which is full of kids whose fathers from Vietnam had fought in areas where there were large swaths of Agent Orange. These children are deformed. 

There was this little 15-year-old girl who was about 3-foot high. She had drawn a painting that she gave to me. There was another beautiful girl who had black splotches all over her body. There were dozens, scores of these kids at this hospital, all of whom had felt a generational effect on the body of war. And it continues into the new century. One of my best friends, Michael Weisskopf, a fellow journalist with whom I wrote a book, and have worked for 30 years, went to Iraq to cover it. He was in a Humvee with soldiers, something came into the Humvee, he just instinctively picked it up to throw it out. He saved six lives and lost his right arm. He'll never have that arm again. The story of Greg Gadson, who was a football player at West Point. 

One of the characters in my book, one of the scenes from Robin's dance is called Holleder's Run. Donald Holleder was an All American football player at West Point. He was a major in Vietnam. He was in a helicopter when this ambush got underway. He landed the helicopter and started running instinctively toward the trouble. He got shot down, running just as he did as a quarterback for the Army football team. Thirty years later, Greg Gadson, another great football player from West Point is in Iraq. In 2007, a roadside bomb goes off, he loses both legs and one arm. He sort of became adopted by the Black Lions who I had written about in this book. So, I go to visit Greg at Walter Reed. 

An incredible survivor, this powerful black man from Virginia, who had gone off to fight in Iraq, and gave two legs and an arm. Just seeing him all the times I did was a constant reminder of war in the body. I thought I'd turned Greg into a Packers fan because I gave him a copy of my Lombardi book. I don't know if any of you remember, but the next year when the Packers played the New York Giants in the NFL-NFC championship game, Greg Gadson is on the Giants' sideline, their good luck charm. So, I've always blamed him for that loss. The body and Walter Reed. Two of my great friends at the Washington Post, who I edited, Dana Priest and Anne Hull, spent many months going over to a certain part of Walter Reed. This is a vast medical center in Washington. Terrific medical care. Greg Gadson was alive because of the medical care, and how it's changed since the era of Vietnam. 

He would've died in Vietnam. So many of these soldiers in the modern wars come home with these incredible wounds. Wounds of the body and of the soul. So Walter Reed was great at fixing them. And then it could care less about them, after that first moment, if they're no longer of any use to the Army, to the military machine. So there was this whole quarter of Walter Reed Medical Center that people didn't know about, where they were warehousing, essentially, these soldiers who weren't ready to go back into the military, were not ready to go home, still recovering from their wounds. They were living in a hell hole that had mold on the walls. There were mice droppings everywhere. That series of stories really exposed decades of hypocrisy, of sort of the military right wing seizing the issue of patriotism and making it theirs. And it was all fine, except when the soldiers were of no use to them anymore, then they were housed at Walter Reed in this godforsaken place. 

And it was the body.  In 1967, Lyndon Johnson was president. Today, the president is Barack Obama. I'm writing a book about Barack Obama. I wrote a book in which LBJ was a character. It's fascinating and haunting to me that really, Barack Obama is president. He wouldn't be president if not for Lyndon Johnson. We all have these contradictions in us. But it was exactly on Barack Obama's third birthday, August 4, 1964, that the Senate passed the final version of the Civil Rights Act that made Barack Obama possible. It was that signing of that bill on Barack Obama's birthday, when Johnson turned to his aid Bill Moyers and said, "We've lost. 

The democratic party has lost the country for a generation," which for the most part turned out to be true. But it also produced, all those years later, the first black president in American history. If you don't count Bill Clinton. (laughter) Despite all the falsehoods and mythology, and boy, do I get bombarded with it, that the right wing has spread about Obama, the birthers and the whole notion of where he was born. I've been to Kenya. He wasn't born there. I've been to Hawaii. To believe that he was not born in Hawaii, you would have to believe that there was a conspiracy involving the newspapers in Honolulu in August, 1961, that they knew that this person was going to grow up to be the first black president of the United States, and that he really wasn't born there, so we're just going to pretend, that we should put his birth announcement in the newspaper.  Anyway, despite all of those falsehoods, Barack Obama did grow up in Hawaii in a very different milieu than the people of my generation, the post-war baby boom generation. He did grow up with a liberal, antiwar mother, although she was not in the United States for a lot of the '60s, she was in Indonesia. 

But he also grew up in Honolulu. A black kid in a place where there were very few other African Americans. And the only other ones were in the military at Hickam Air Force Base, and at Schofield Barracks, Pearl Harbor. So Barack Obama was never anti-military. His first instinct was to see the military as a place that was something where people of his color could go. Many people supported him in the 2008 election, I'm sure people in this room, because of what he did in 2003, when he, in Chicago, at the Federal Plaza, gave a speech opposing the war in Iraq before it started, the downtown rally in Chicago. But Barack Obama was very cautious when he appeared at that rally. He was worried that his words would be misinterpreted. His first words in that speech were, "Let me begin by saying that although this has been billed as an antiwar rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances." And he used that refrain throughout the speech. "I don't oppose all wars." He went on to talk about the civil war that drove away the scourge of slavery, and World War II, where his grandfather fought against the Nazis, and two of his great uncles, including one who walked into one of the concentration camps, Ohrdruf, right after it was liberated. 

 Then going into Afghanistan and 9/11, he supported those, too. We're still in Afghanistan, ten years later. That's 2-1/2 times the length of World War II and of the Civil War, we've been in Afghanistan. Obama's entire life, as I've studied it, has been an effort to avoid traps. He avoided the trap of life without a father, his Kenyan father and mother really never lived together, not even for the two years that you think they might've. His father was never there. He avoided the trap of being born what in Hawaii they call a "Hapa," a mixed race kid, on an island further away from any land mass than anywhere in the world. He avoided the trap of being black in a white dominated society. The traps of the anger that can overwhelm a young black man in this society. The traps of politics in Chicago, which is by definition a trap, and the politics of Springfield, Illinois, and of Washington, DC. 

But the traps of war are so different from all of those others. And he hasn't shown yet that he's figured out how to avoid these traps or get around them. From my study of him, I've said for two years that I thought he would figure it out. And now to be honest, I just don't know. It's a very difficult situation for him. One of the differences between now and 1967 is the regard that all of us, whether we opposed the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, any wars that are going on now, the regard that we give the soldiers. It wasn't that way in the Vietnam War. And any Vietnam vet will tell you. You know, whether they got spit on when they came home, some of that is mythology, but it's real in the sense that it represents the sensibility that they felt they were facing, that the country could not care less about them. That's changed, and that's great and very important. 

It's important to the body of these soldiers, to their souls. But there's a way to honor soldiers without falling into the trappings of militaristic nationalism. That's something that, in my opinion, this university's most brilliant history professor ever, George Mosse, wrote about so powerfully. It was an essay he wrote that I found, and it's in my book, about military cemeteries. He wrote, "What then are the ways in which the tragic reality of war was made manageable and acceptable. Central to the confrontation with mass death, was the cult of the fallen soldier. And like all the sacred in our civilization, it was not something new or invented for the purpose, but based upon ancient religious feeling, the adaptation of Christian piety to the war experience. The death of the fallen, their sacrifices for the nation, was often linked to the passion and resurrection of Christ. This was symbolized, for example by the design of English war cemeteries, all of which contain the cross of sacrifice, the cross upon which a sword was superimposed. Sometimes, such a cross faced a chapel of resurrection. 

Such linking of national sacrifice and Christian sacrifice no doubt made it easier to come to terms with the tragedy of war. Military cemeteries symbolized this confrontation with mass death. As places of national and Christian worship, they made it easier to accept death by transcending it. But even while continuing to honor the memory of the fallen, we must never lose our horror, never try to integrate war and its consequences into our longing for the sacred. If we confront mass death naked," as these dances do and will, "stripped of all myth, we may finally have more of a chance to avoid making the devil's pact with that aggressive nationalism, whose blood trail marked our century." That was George Mosse writing in the 1960s. And it still prevails today. So blessed are the peacemakers and the dancers. Thank you very much. (applause)