Marines and SDS: Catch-22 at the OGCP

SDS canceled its demonstration last Friday because the Marine recruiter didn't show up at the Office for Graduate and Career Plans. The Marine didn't come because no one signed the appointment sheet.

But why did no one sign the appointment sheet?

Because the OGCP secretaries told students who tried to sign up on Wednesday and Thursday that the Marine recruiter, Major Donald E. Hubbard, was not coming because no one had signed up to see him.

While at the same time, Robert Ginn, associate director of the OGCP, was telling Hubbard in a Wednesday afternoon conversation that he would wait until Friday morning before canceling the visit. Hubbard said that if anyone signed up, he wanted to come.

Friday, at 8:30 a.m., Hubbard called Ginn, who told him that since no students had asked for appointments, the normal procedure would be to cancel the visit. Hubbard agreed, although, he said later in an interview, "I was just ready to go and considered going down anyway. I was only about 15 minutes away."

But Hubbard didn't go and SDS called off its demonstration. SDS spokesmen claimed a victory-which Hubbard and OGCP officials vigorously denied. A group of Young Republicans, who had staged a small counter-demonstration when SDS protested at the last Marine recruiter visit December 3, investigated the matter.

Meeting with Hubbard and John B. Fox Jr., director of the OGCP, the three Young Republicans-George M. Bredig '72, John Garvey '74 and Philip J. MacDonnell '72 -complained that at least two people, Garvey and Lawrence R. Bowers '71, had tried to make appointments on Thursday. The secretaries in the office told Garvey and Bowers that the Marine's visit had been canceled. They gave the same information to several people who telephoned the office.

In an interview, Fox said, "We had no knowledge of anyone wanting to sign up. People who came in said nothing about making appointments. They just wanted to know whether he was coming. No one, as far as we know, had come in to ask to see him Friday morning."

Fox said he told the secretaries that while as of Wednesday the Marine wasn't coming, he would come if anyone had signed up by Friday morning.

"When I told the gals that the guy wasn't coming. I might not have made it sufficiently clear to them that he would have come if someone was interested," Fox admitted. "I didn't say clearly, 'If they want to come, we can call him.'"

The secretaries say they were told Wednesday about 2 p.m. -the same time Ginn first called Hubbard-that the interview was canceled.

"I don't know anything about telephone conversations-that go on in the upper echelons," one secretary said. "We were just told that the interviews were canceled." Which is what they told students.

So when Ginn checked the sign-up sheet Friday morning, he found no names on it.

"It's all a misunderstanding, as far as I understand," Ginn said yesterday. "The secretaries felt people were soliciting information about a possible demonstration. No one said, 'Can I sign up with the Marine recruiter?' They all said, 'Is the Marine recruiter coming?'"

But the secretaries say they had no way of know-

ing whether a student was genuinely interested and therefore made no judgments. Ginn later agreed that if a student, asking to see the sign-up sheet or inquiring if rumors of cancellation were true, was told that the Marine was in fact not coming, he could not be expected to ask for an appointment.

At least one student who inquired, Bowers, was interested in discussing the Marine officer candidate program. He has already made a tentative commitment to the Navy and wanted to check out the Marines before finalizing his plans. Garvey, like Bowers, says he specifically asked to make an appointment.

"There was no subterfuge involved," Ginn said, Answering a question, he said that the SDS demonstration was never a consideration. Neither was the timing of the visit, two days after the protests against the Allied invasion of Laos, he said.

"We've had this trouble with the Marines time and again," Ginn said. "If they don't come to campus, they try to suggest we have connived and subterfuged to keep them from coming."

A Navy recruiter will be at the OGCP on February 24. SDS plans to demonstrate; as one spokesman said, "This is a concrete way of opposing the war." The Young Republicans intend to counterdemonstrate "to protect the freedoms of speech and assembly." Both sides claim victory in the last episode. As Hubbard said: "It all sounds like Catch-22 to me."