Finally, the Sixties Are Over

In a televised speech he delivered shortly before he was killed in cold blood in the summer of 1963, Medgar Evers boldly declared that "history has reached a turning point, here and over the world." His words, originally intended as commentary on the plight of the civil rights movement, might serve as a profound epitaph for two crucial events of last week--the conviction of Evers' murderer Byron de la Beckwith by a Mississippi jury and the decision by the Clinton administration to normalize relations with Vietnam.

The decisions, made under radically different circumstances in radically different loci nonetheless point to a common historical subtext. The Sixties, a decade that bequeathed to us a legacy of open, festering wounds, officially ended last Saturday.

On June 12, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith aimed and fired his deer rifle at the Mississippi field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and a father of three. The murder quickly became a watershed in the history of the civil rights movement, a spur to greater national awareness both of the evil of racism and of the collective obligation to remedy it.

But De La Beckwith, twice tried by all-white juries in 1964, was never convicted of the crime--that is, until last Saturday, when a jury of eight blacks and four whites needed only six hours of deliberation to declare him guilty as accused.

On Thursday of last week, President Clinton closed another wound in the American body politic by declaring an end to the 19-year ban on trade with Vietnam. Citing increased cooperation from the Vietnamese on the matter of American MIA's, Clinton, who personally avoided service in the war, became the man responsible for officially ending it.

The move was politically dangerous for the President, because of his evasion of the draft and his subsequent evasion of the truth on the issue during his presidential campaign. But speaking in the company of an audience that included Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a veteran who has for some time demanded an end to the embargo, and Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam, the President was able to overcome his limited political strength in favor of a fresh and long-needed shift in national priorities.

"Whatever the Vietnam War may have done in dividing our country in the past," he said, "today our nation is one in honoring those who served." Our first "Sixties Generation" President last Thursday slammed the door on a formative period in his personal development and the development of our nation.

Twenty-six years since the Tet offensive and 31 since the murder of Medgar Evers, bygones have finally become bygones--at least in the consciousness of America. But at our prestigious university, bygones still masquerade as contemporary issues.

Take, for instance, the National Security Education Program, a federal grant designed to fund undergraduate and graduate study abroad in non-West European countries.

So far, so good. But the director of the CIA occupies a seat on the program's Board of Overseers, a fact that is disturbing to some members of the Harvard Faculty Council. There is little doubt that the government's interest in funding a program of area studies--linguistic and cultural--has to do with the long-range goal of producing diplomats and intelligence experts. But listen to the Council's statement explaning why that is distasteful.

"[The national security] aspects of the program lead some faculty to be concerned about the safety of students funded by this program in some parts of the world," the Council said.

If you are looking for a good working definition of "rubbish," you might have just stumbled upon it. What is at stake for the Council is not a deep-seated concern for the physical welfare of students. If that were the case, the Peace Corps, which sends graduates to the heart of the Third World, or Teach for America, which brings students into inner city ghettos, would incur similar faculty scrutiny.

Instead, the Harvard faculty insists on projecting its hopelessly superannuated Weltenschauung onto current political and social realities. The visceral disdain for the letters CIA--or indeed the entire military establishment--has reached comic dimensions on our campus, a vestige of a political sensibility that in the rest of the country has gone the way of the eight-track tape.

With Byron De La Beckwith about to live out his last days in jail and the United States about to embark on an economic relationship with Vietnam, a decade--and with it, a mindset--has passed on. It is left to us at Harvard to follow the lead of the rest of our nation, and to turn the six on our daily planners upside-down to reveal that it is, in fact, a nine.