Early in the afternoon of Friday, March 26, to prevent bomb scares, the police closed Sanders Theatre, the venue for our Counter Teach-In on the war in Vietnam. Student marshals met in the Phillips Brooks House basement at 6:30 p.m. for a briefing by a lawyer and at 6:55 most of us went to Sanders Theatre and were allowed in at 7:15, where, being the first to arrive, we took strategic seats at the front and along the aisles. The general audience entered at 7:30 and immediately began chanting as well as making announcements from the stage.
From 7:00 to 7:50 a press conference with all the speakers, including the Vietnamese and Thai diplomats, took place; at 7:50, accompanied by three university police and a sizable entourage, they walked to Memorial Hall, the building that includes Sanders Theatre. Once inside, they entered Room 136 where Professor Archibald Cox, special advisor to Harvard's president, told them his plans should problems occur. About 7:55, police at Memorial Hall, who had been counting each person upon entry into the building, closed the doors; Sanders' capacity of 1,238 had been reached.
 Sanders Theatre. |
At 8:00 sharp, the speakers entered Sanders Theatre; it was already noisy but became much more so as they appeared on the stage. During the first few minutes, it appeared that a majority of the audience, perhaps 800 persons, including at least one bullhorn, were chanting. The moderator, J. Lawrence McCarty, approached the microphone under a volley of thrown items but made no attempt to speak due to the persistent noise. Within a couple of minutes the moderator withdrew, Cox mounted the stage and appealed to the disrupters – who by this time numbered perhaps 300 persons – to allow the speakers to be heard. By the end of his appeal, approximately 200 persons, the number that would continue to the end of the meeting, still made noise.
After Cox, the first speaker, Dan Teodoru, took the microphone. After berating the disrupters, receiving occasional applause, he invited one of them to speak on the stage for 10 minutes of his time. Soon, after momentary prevention by the marshals, the self-styled moderate Richard Zorza reached the microphone. The noise did not subside as he spoke, so he eventually returned to the audience. Teodoru then invited someone else to speak; an unidentified person went up and called for ten minutes of silence. During those ten minutes, there was silence from the stage but not in the hall, as the chanting relentlessly continued.
 Archibald Cox closed the event. |
The crowd dissipated slowly; many stayed behind to see if anything further would happen. While three of the speakers eventually left Memorial Hall on their own, the two diplomatic officials were escorted by the Harvard police through the steam tunnels to the Hoffman Laboratories, then driven to their hotel. Several calls were made to attack Harvard's Center for International Affairs, but that fizzled.
Mr. Pipes is a senior at Harvard College. © 1971 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
Mar. 1, 2021 update: I published a full account of the above event at "Harvard's Counter Teach-In, 50 Years Later: How a student disruption prefigured the extremism of today's college campuses."
