I would like to add my ruminations to Amelie Oksenberg Rorty’s and Kamala Visweswaran’s informative and sensitive comments about the 1970 fire at the Center. I have written a few paragraphs about it in books on the anti-Vietnam War movement and Richard Nixon.
My wife Sara and I were called around 7:30 a.m. on April 24 by our neighbor, Barbara Van Slyke, the late wife of Stanford historian Lyman Van Slyke, who told us she had just heard a report that the Center had been firebombed. I jumped in our car to drive up the hill wondering what had burned. Unlike John Rawls and M.N. Srinivas, I had no important manuscripts or research materials in my study. The fires started burning at each end of the semicircle of studies but never reached mine, which that was equidistant from the ends. The next day, when I asked Jack what he was thinking as he drove up to see what was left of the only copy of his magnum opus, he calmly said he was prepared to start all over on his twenty-year project. ((Jack was one of the most humble great men I have ever met. We attended an antiwar protest meeting a few weeks later in a Stanford auditorium where Jack expressed support to me for a proposed civil disobedient action on the Golden Gate Bridge. When I gently suggested that it did not meet the criteria as laid out in his 1969 article on the subject, he agreed that I, an untutored historian, was correct and he changed his position on the action.)
The fire occurred a week before the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on April 30. On April 23 there had been a major protest and sit-in on Stanford’s campus concerning university issues, including classified research, which ended with a police charge, rock throwing, and scores of arrests. Many thought that the Center firebombing, which still is unsolved, was related to the previous day’s protest and that the radicals had confused the Stanford Research Institute, which did conduct classified research, with the Center, which, of course, did not. (Alan Henderson, the Center’s business officer, suspected that the arsonist was the young man who ran the copying machine and reported his evidence to the FBI but nothing seemed to have resulted from his action)
President Nixon expressed outrage and offered to help Professor Srinivas, in particular, by recruiting restoration experts. Fast forward to May 1, the day after the Cambodian invasion, when Nixon, visiting the Pentagon, commented, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.” Several Nixon aides later reported that the president was talking about the Center firebombers and not the students who began protesting on their campuses as soon as they heard about the escalation of the war the previous night. After the “bums” remark, student antiwarriors began carrying signs that read “I am not a bum.” At his May 8th press conference, Nixon expressed regret that some thought he had labeled all protestors bums.
The academic year 1969-1970 was an epochal one. Antiwar protests swelled at the Moratorium and Mobilization demonstrations in the fall as the president fought back with his appeal to the Silent Majority and Vice President Spiro Agnew’s assault on the media. Nationwide, colleges dealt with civil and not so civil protests over black and women’s studies, the war, classified research, and student rights. These issues naturally reached our idyllic community on the hill.
There were several outspoken conservative fellows at the Center that year who may have conflated the Center bombing with the protestors in general. I was the youngest, most junior by far and among the more active liberals in our class. From time to time, fellows put announcements of meetings and concerts in our mailboxes. After I followed suit with the announcement of a Stanford Cambodian protest, I was summoned to second-in-command Preston Cutler’s office who informed me, in an uncharacteristically stern manner, that I should not place political announcements in our mail boxes.
I spent my year at the Center studying public opinion and foreign policy, materials that figured prominently in my work in the eighties when I turned to the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. I had also been a participant-observer in political activities at Stanford and San Francisco during that especially turbulent class year. And, most important, the conversations and colloquia with some of our nation’s brightest and most innovative thinkers contributed dramatically to my intellectual development such as it turned out to be.
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