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.
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 )