Word: indochina
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Arrayed against the Left is a small but growing Harvard Right, centered around the Young Republican Club, who will also push for a vote, hoping that declining passions in the wake of the American withdrawal from Indochina will restore widespread support for the military's return...
...Army laid waste to Vietnam and Cambodia, arguments in favor of training Harvard students to join it carried little force. Although the Faculty in 1969 opposed ROTC primarily because its existence violated University autonomy, the students who struck for its abolition were moved more by the carnage in Indochina...
This growing sense of the importance of an elitist military leadership is the strongest weapon in the Harvard Right's arsenal. The Republicans and their allies generally supported American intervention in Indochina, but they will probably softpedal that line. If the Right want to win a referendum, if they expect that Harvard's left-liberal masses will vote for something like a non-credit ROTC program, they will have to center its appeals on the allegedly ameliorating effect Harvard men will have on the military...
...WILL the Left counter this anticipated appeal? Most likely, the rebuttal will consist of a grim recital of the facts. The ROTC program at Harvard before the Indochina War obviously did nothing to mitigate the horrors of the war. As for the humanity of Harvard men, no statistics exist for the incidence of atrocities among ground troops, but at the top of the command chain the criminal venture was planned by Harvard men--McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the Faculty, Robert MacNamara, a graduate of the Business School, and later Henry A. Kissinger '50, a former professor of Government...
...however, memory rather than logic will probably be the decisive factor. If the Indochina horrors are only dimly recollected by current Harvard students--eighth graders at the height of the American intervention--the Right's arguments may carry the day. If, however, America's war crimes have not lost their stark, searing vividness, ROTC will once again be turned down. In some sense, the dispute's outcome hinges on when the Class of '77 stopped reading Batman and started reading about MyLai...