Symposium 1968: Michael Walzer

It was opposition to the Vietnam War that filled my time and occupied my mind in 1967 and ’68. I was one of the organizers of Vietnam Summer in ’67 and then of the Cambridge Neighborhood Committee on the War in the fall of that year. The CNC circulated petitions to put a question about the war on the November ballot and, after a number of legal challenges, succeeded in doing that. So the citizens of Cambridge were invited to vote for or against the war, and about 40 percent of them voted against. That was roughly the same percentage that similar campaigns achieved in Flint, Michigan, and San Francisco. Not good enough, obviously, especially since we had chosen the most favorable sites. Look at the results more closely, however, and you will see a far more serious problem with what seemed to us the most obvious kind of left politics.

A Harvard graduate student in sociology, later an editor of Dissent, did a study of the ’67 referendum, and the findings were disturbing to old leftists—and even to new ones. In the old language, we had strong bourgeois support and virtually no working-class support. Or, more scientifically, the higher the rent you paid, the greater the value of your house, the more likely you were to vote against the war. What is wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong became clearer the next year when I was working for Eugene McCarthy. A few of the CNC activists moved into draft resistance, but most of us were committed to electoral politics; we wanted to be where the people were, or where large numbers of them were, and that seemed to require engagement within the Democratic Party. So we sent volunteers to New Hampshire in February 1968, and we even succeeded in forcing the Boston/Cambridge Democrats to include a few of our people among the delegates they sent to the Democratic National Convention that summer. But our effort to be where the people were produced the same odd result as in the referendum. Though we never did a survey, I am pretty sure it was true that the higher the rent you paid, the greater the value of your house, the more likely you were to support McCarthy.

But no left or liberal candidate can win an election with that kind of support. There is nothing wrong with people who pay high rents or own expensive houses; many of them, too, are salt of the earth. And I still believe that our position on the war was the right one. But we were a little too sure about that rightness and a little too proud of our high-mindedness. Confronting patriotic citizens from Cambridge’s working-class neighborhoods, who were far more likely than our supporters were to have kids in Vietnam, we had neither charity nor humility. In the CNC, we didn’t spell America with a “k” and we didn’t wave Viet Cong flags, but some of our allies did, and we never figured out how to distance ourselves from them. Too many leftists in those years believed in the maxim of “No enemies to the left!” And th...