Enthusiastic Crowd Jams Teach-In

A largely enthusiastic crowd of more than 1200 people packed Sanders Theatre last night to witness the first major campus antiwar action this school year.

Others filled Memorial Hall and part of Lowell Lec to hear former Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Rep. Bella Abzug (D-N.Y.), New York Times columnist Tom Wicker and six other official speakers declaim against American policy in Southeast Asia. Others listened on WGBH radio. Harvard station WHRB broadcast the Beanpot hockey game.

More than 100 people were waiting outside Sanders at 6 p.m., an hour before the doors opened and two hours before the teach-in began at 8 p.m. President-elect Derek C. Bok and his wife Sissela Bok arrived at 7:45. The eight official speakers talked until 10:30, introduced by moderator Michael L. Walzer, professor of Government. Questions and answers, and statements by other groups including SDS, the Young Americans for Freedom, and the Progressive Labor Party, extended the meeting until midnight.

'Let SDS Speak'

SDS and PL sympathizers gathered in the balcony, from which they occasionally taunted speakers, but were shouted down by the rest of the crowd when they became too insistent. They attempted to prevent Walzer from introducing the fifth speaker, James C. Thompson, lecturer in History and former staff member of the National Security Council, by chanting "Let SDS speak." SDS had been denied an official speaker during the first part of the meeting.

Walzer, clearly prepared for the out-burst, which had been promised half-way through the proceedings, said from the rostrum, "People like me have given a lot of lectures about self-destructive tendencies on the left-but one picture is worth a thousand words. Is this the kind of peace movement you want?"

Little Disruption

Most of the room shouted, "No," Walzer said, "Then we will continue." And the rest of the speakers continued with little disruption except from a leaky radiator which spewed steam until the heat was turned off.

Walzer, in his introduction, said the teach-in was the beginning of what the student and faculty organizers hoped would be a chain of 100 such events at universities across the country. He said it could represent the revival of a peace movement dedicated to hard work "without revolutionary chatter and romantic self-indulgence."

At Yale, 2500 people gathered in Woolsey Hall to hear former AttorneyGeneral Ramsey Clark call for immediate withdrawal of U. S. troops from South Vietnam. Other anti-war speakers at the Yale teach-in included Averill Harriman, former U. S. Ambassador to the Paris peace talks.

As Harriman and Clark spoke at Yale, McCarthy was telling his Sanders audience, "I have very little sympathy with those who turned against the war between the defeat of Hubert Humphrey and the election of 1970."

McCarthy said there was a medieval custom that counselors who gave bad advice were executed, "while now the practice seems to be to give them a welcome sanctuary in the academic community." He said, "Perhaps it's unfortunate the old custom has been discontinued."

In his introduction of McCarthy, Walzer mentioned that it is only a year to the New Hampshire primary. But McCarthy spoke only in veiled terms about any political plans.

"The substance of the campaign," he said, "if there is to be a campaign, will be different from the one of 1968. The methods will be essentially different." In a typical elegant construction, McCarthy said that in 1968, Johnson had presented a personality to incarnate the policy; presented a policy with "at least the air of legality"; and attempted to show a relationship between causes and consequences.

He said that today Nixon has attempted to confuse the responsibility for his policy; no longer attempts to claim legality; and justifies his actions by naming as causes what used to be consequences.

McCarthy warned, "If we do not draw the line on using U. S. troops in Vietnam and Laos, there will be no reason for us to stop short of China, and maybe even all the way to Moscow."

The surprise hit of the evening was Wicker, who, in a remarkably militant speech, called Vietnam "a war to preserve American delusions of grandeur-a war of war crimes.

"We are spreading the holocaust in Indochina," he continued, saying that the difference between the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz, which he recently visited, and the American effort in Asia is that "We are incinerating people without taking the booty." He advocated more teach-ins, pressure on politicians, and even withholding of taxes to force an end to American involvement.

Wicker said, "We must face up to the fact that there is something deeply wrong in our country and the war is only the sickest fruit."

He received a standing ovation.

Another well received speech was Abzug's, which started the evening. She said Nixon was convinced that "You are all majoring in apathy." Someone in the crowd yelled, "bull-shit," and Abzug replied, "That's right. If I believed that, I wouldn't be here.

"I can't believe you're going to continue to let a white, male, middle-aged, middle-class, rural power structure continue to have its way," she said.

M. I. T. professor Noam Chomsky, the final official speaker, said, "In 20 years, the U. S. has not swerved from its goal of dominating Southeast Asia." He said the danger of American subjugation of the area is even more ominous now because of the recent discovery of oil off the Vietnam coast.

"Because of American bombing and other pacification efforts," Chomsky said, "South Vietnam in 1960 was 85 per cent rural; it is now 40 to 50 per cent rural. "There are limits to the strength of a popular movement, but there are no limits to the strength of American technology," Chomsky said.

Cynthia Frederick, a journalist recently expelled from South Vietnam for participation in an anti-war people's organization, spoke of the growth of anti-war sentiment in Saigon. Thompson discussed the power role of presidential advisors in determining-and potentially changing-Indochina policy.

Other official speakers included Rep. Donald F. Riegle (R-Mich.) and Walter Pincus, former staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who stressed the importance of pressuring Congress; and Stanley Hoffmann, professor of Government, who said the U. S. must not simply withdraw its troops, but help set up a government in South Vietnam which can work with the Communists.

Unofficial speakers at the end of the meeting included representatives of SDS, PL, a Puerto Rican liberation group, and the Young Socialist Alliance.