...And Their Conjurers

"EVERYONE WARNED us, 'You are crazy to start a book and a marriage at the same time,'" says Nancy Zaroulis, who ignored everyone's advice and both married and co-wrote Who Spoke Up? with Gerald J. Sullivan '43. "Actually the book brought us closer together. Now we have to look for another book to write or the marriage will fall apart," Zaroulis says.

"That's a little joke," she adds.

Zaroulis and Sullivan are a cheerful couple, clearly pleased with their recently-released 460-page history of American protest against the Vietnam War. (See accompanying story)

"This is history that would have been lost," Zaroulis explains. "Nobody else was going around talking to these people....

"I woke up in the middle of the night six years ago and said. 'No one has written a history of the antiwar movement,'" she adds. Her agent had reservations about the subject. "In 1978, you couldn't sell a book about Vietnam. It was death," Zaroulis recalls.

But when Allard Lowenstein, a key figure in the McCarthy campaign of 1968 and other antiwar activities, was murdered in 1980, "It was as if God was tapping me on the shoulder and saying, 'Get on with it. People are dying off.'"

"I realized I needed help. It was a monumental job," she adds.

Sullivan, a former professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, met Zaroulis on the Green Line in 1979. The partnership was on.

Careful readers of the couple's book might detect a trace of bias. But the authors say they weren't a part of this freedom-loving movement.

"I had been active in the first anti-nuclear effort that arose in the late 1950s and early 1960s to ban nuclear testing in the atmosphere," Zaroulis says.

But during the Vietnam War, she adds, "I was having babies."

As for Sullivan, he was director of student affairs at UMass-Boston during the student disturbances, "including periodic take-overs of the registrar's office and the chancellor's office," he recalls.

"One time they took over [the chancellor's] conference room and let him have his office. After a few days, when nothing happened, they took over the office too, though they let him in every few days to check his papers," he says.

"We just rode them out, trying to keep the teaching activity going whenever possible, but we didn't call in the police, like some places around here."

His son Nicholas P. Sullivan '72 was one of the students involved in the Harvard University Hall takeover of 1969, "more out of curiosity than anything else," says the father. "He wanted to see his records."

WHO SPOKE UP? is intended to be a readable exercise in popular history, its author's say, as well as a reference book for future studies. It is not, however--despite the details and the size of the tome--an academic work.

"I don't write academic books, because I write for a living, and people have to buy the books, so they have to be readable," says Zaroulis.

"I have this suspicion that academic writers start with a thesis and then marshal evidence to support that. We could have done that," Sullivan adds, "but that's left for others to do, and we hope people will use this book when they do."

It may have practical uses too, particularly with the rising American protests against the American military presence in Central America.

"There's our sequel," says Zaroulis.

"Don't say that," Sullivan adds quickly.