Tactical differences, although real, were usually not broad enough to destroy the radical-liberal coalition. The two groups may have disagreed about the reasons for the war, the structure of America and the ultimate vision of the just society, but on the immediate issue of the moment they were in agreement--the war must stop. Now that the was seems to be over, this bedrock basis for a firm alliance is eroding, causing the two groups to drift away from each other.
If the bombing resumes, the alliance will form once again. But if, as is more likely, Watergate and Congress prevent the resumption of the aerial genocide, the war will have disappeared. Barring another brutal American intervention in the Third World in the near future, radicalism on campus will pull up abruptly at a temporary stasis, probing gently for new outlets, a new basis for the alliance.
IV
THE NUMBER of confirmed radicals here probably hovers somewhere around 200--perhaps half what it was at the peak of the 1969-70 activism. This number, though smaller, is still large enough to provide the initial spark for successful activiist campaigns. Moreover, most of the Harvard left is centralized in the New American Movement, a group which eschews the fanatic factionalism of the most recent incarnation of SDS. The left is organizationally stronger here than it has been since 1970.
NAM conducted a wide range of activities last year, including a support campaign for the United Farm Workers' lettuce boycott, a petition campaign against Harvard's Faculty hiring policy--which allegedly discriminates against radicals--and Vietnam-America Friendship Week, a program of films and teach-ins about the war.
By past standards, all of these campaigns were well-palnned, yet all of them failed in varying degrees. The immediate fault lay not with the radicals, but with the lack of response from Harvard's phalanxes of left-liberals, who still make up the bulk of the undergraduate population.
As recently as 1960, a majority of the undergraduates here were Republicans, but the flow of events in the sixties steered the entire campus quite a few degrees leftward, situating most students at a point on the political spectrum where they could be attracted to support radical campaigns, particularly those concentrating on the war.
The lightbulb-eating analysis by the professional mystifiers at Time Magazine notwithstanding, most Harvard students still adhere to this hazy left-liberalism. Polls taken last fall indicated that more than 70 per cent of the student body here intended to vote for George McGovern for president. The basis for a Spring activist coalition still existed.
Then the war ended, and with it with immediate chances for a successful activist upsurge. No sane person, of course, would exchange a resumption of the genocide in Vietnam for the increased prospects it would mean for Harvard activism. Still, no new formula for unity was found to replace the old one. NAM sputtered about, groping for a new basis for the old alliance.
Whether such an synthesis can be achieved at Harvard in the absence of Vietnam is an open question. The war presented us with a stark contrast between good and evil, a contrast which blurs into varying shades of grey on other issues. Criminal apocalypses loomed at several junctures over the past decade--the Cambodian invasion, the mining--but now, in the relative quiet of the moment, our fears at them seem almost juvenile. With the war nearly over, the imperatives for action are less obvious, less strident.
As the search for the future proceeds tentatively, the meaning of the past becomes ever more clear. Vietnam has changed the lives of all of us. It has illuminated the yawning chasm between our government's professed ideals and its conduct. It has forced us to examine our society and our history more closely, searching for an explanation for the decade of genocide.
At the same time that Vietnam depicted the contradictions of American society framed by burning napalm fire, it hinted that the impasse can be traversed. The Vietnamese have prevailed. They have gone several steps further toward winning their freedom and are now in the process of constructing a socialist society of freedom, humanity, equality and justice across all Vietnam. Though the tactics of their struggle have little immediate relevance to the tasks before us in a modernized society, their success in the face of insurmountable odds gives us heart that those tasks can eventually be accomplished in America.
Despite battling in the inferno, the Vietnamese have not lost their humanity. The violence which for decades they have been forced to contend with the resort to has not obscured their goals or tarnished their ultimate vision. Vietnam will be free, and Vietnam has taught America both the price and the value of freedom