cc

>> Norma Saldivar: Good evening.

Thank you so much

for being with us this evening.

It's my distinct pleasure to

introduce this evening's

Hilldale Lecturer.

The Hilldale Lecture Series was

inaugurated in 1973, and is

sponsored by the four divisional

committees of the faculty.

Through the Hilldale Lecture

Series, we are given the

opportunity to hear from

distinguished thinkers who have

contributed to contemporary

culture and science, and have

received international

recognition and acclaim.

This evening's guest is most

definitely a man of distinction,

and undeniably worthy to be with

us tonight as the Hilldale

Lecturer.

A journalist and writer, our

guest began his distinguished

career here in Madison as a true

cub reporter while still in high

school, reporting on the local

war protests.

He is currently Associate Editor

at the Washington Post, where he

has worked since 1977.

In 1993, he won his first

Pulitzer Prize for National

Reporting, for his work on the

life and times of Bill Clinton.

In 2008, he was part of the team

of reporters who won the

Pulitzer for coverage of the

Virginia Tech tragedy.

That same year, the 2008

Pulitzer Gold Medal Award went

to the team reporting on Walter

Reed Medical Center, for which

he served as editor.

In addition, he has been a

Pulitzer finalist twice for his

achievements in journalism and

then again for his book, They

Marched Into Sunlight, the

inspiration for the Sunlight

Project and Symposium.

Tonight's distinguished guest

has also written on a variety of

subjects, which include

critically acclaimed and best

selling books, First in his

Class, a biography about Bill

Clinton; Rome 1960: When the

World Stirred at the Summer

Olympics; Clemente: The Passion

and Grace of Baseball's Last

Hero; and When Pride Still

Mattered: A Life of Vince

Lombardi, which incidentally,

has been adapted to the stage

and opened this past October on

Broadway at Circle in the Square

Theater, starring Dan Lauria and

Judith Light.

His latest book released in

January is an anthology of his

newspaper articles entitled Into

the Story: A Writer's Journey

Through Life, Politics, Sports

and Loss.

His current work is a

multi-generational biography of

Barack Obama entitled Out of

This World, to be published in

2012.

Our guest is a fellow of a

Society of American Historians.

He's the son of a newspaper

editor, a husband to

environmentalist Linda, father

to Andre and Sarah, grandfather

to Heidi and Eva, and a resident

of Washington, DC, and his

hometown Madison, Wisconsin.

He's a man of distinction who's

written works of great detail,

revelation, depth and humanity.

In reading his writing, and then

meeting our guest, I'm reminded

of a wonderful quote by the

great American playwright

Tennessee Williams, who once

said, "If the writing is honest,

it cannot be separated from the

man who wrote it."

Ladies and gentlemen, I am very

pleased to present to you, this

evening's Hilldale Lecturer,

David Maraniss.

[APPLAUSE]

>> David Maraniss: Thank you,

Norma, Andrew and all of the

people who made this conference

possible, and the Memorial

Union, of which I am now on the

Board of Directors, largely

because I used to hang out here

and not go to class, and to

Dean Sheehan, and everyone

who made this possible.

In Madison, again, we live in

interesting times.

I grew up here.

So did my wife.

We went to school here.

We came back to do research for

the book about which this

conference is about, They

Marched Into Sunlight, in 2001,

and realized that we could come

home again.

So we bought a house here and

spend as much time as my work

allows, and to be honest, as

much time as the weather allows

here.

But Madison, as you all know, is

a special place, really, unlike

almost anywhere else in America.

Part of it is the natural

beauty.

Part of it is the progressive

tradition of this city and of

this university.

The sifting and winnowing in

search of truth.

And most of it really has to do

with the people, who are

incredibly startlingly friendly,

first of all.

When you come from Washington,

my wife said that the first

encounter she had when we landed

on Wednesday was in the Women's

room at the airport, where two

women were in a fight over who

was more sorry for whatever they

were doing.

I'm sorry.

No, I'm sorry.

No, I'm sorry.

And that's Madison.

So it's startling friendliness,

and intelligence, and a

progressive political awareness

that is always welcoming and

uplifting to come back to,

especially from Washington.

I wish I'd been here a few weeks

ago, during the uprising at the

capitol.

But even now, this is a

fascinating time to be back, and

to be here dealing with the

subjects of our discussions, and

our dances of these two days,

which connect so interestingly

to what's going on in the past.

I emphasize these dances,

because they're really want

brought me here.

You know, I'm honored to be able

to speak and be called a

Hilldale Lecturer, and I'm

fascinated by the panel

discussions that are going on.

But it's the dance that really

is where my heart is right now.

Several years ago, a great

choreographer and friend of mine

named Robin Becker called me and

said that she wanted to try to

something with the book that

she'd read, They Marched Into

Sunlight.

My standing joke is that all of

my books are in various stages

of not being made into movies.

One of them actually is a play

on Broadway right now, Lombardi,

which is great fun.

But of all the different

possible art forms, there's

something about modern dance,

and a transformation of a book

into dance that I just found

fascinating and actually

thrilling.

I've been to several of the

workshops of this particular

dance in New York City at the

92nd Street Y.

I have not seen Jin-Wen's dance

yet, but I know that that will

be fabulous, too.

But all of this, and we're

actually going to show one scene

from Robin Becker's dance during

my speech, because as I said,

I'm not here to talk, I'm here

to be part of this larger

effort.

One dance is really worth a

thousand words, especially of my

words.

You know, in some ways, the

Madison of today resonates with

the Madison of 1967, the time of

my book and of these dances.

Both were years of intensifying

public protest, of people

standing up against powerful

interests, challenging the

government and corporate

interests, questioning the

morality and legality of an

action.

Then, it was the war in Vietnam.

Now, it's the war against public

workers, teachers.

All public movements, all great

movements, when you boil it down

to the essence, they are a

combination of at least two

important things.

One is idealism.

And the other is self-interest.

That's not putting self interest

in a negative light, it's just

what can drive people to these

moments.

You always wonder, when was

Madison going to come back and

be what it was in the 1960s.

And unfortunately or fortunately

in some ways, it took something

of this magnitude.

But when you look at any of the

great movements in American

history, and world history, but

in America, you have the civil

rights movement, the women's

feminist movement.

Around the world, the fall of

Eastern Europe, the revolutions

that started spreading from

Tunisia to Egypt and through the

Middle East.

All of these have that same

combination, a yearning for

freedom and idealism, and also a

feeling of people that they're

getting a raw deal, and that's

the self-interest.

In Madison, not only the

combination of jobs, the value

of real work, the worth of

teachers and labor unions,

questions about a society where

a pair of billionaires can

mettle with and try to undo the

great progressive traditions of

this state, what one of the

great professors here, Bill

Cronon, called a radical break

from the progressive traditions

of this state, what this state

stands for.

The combination in the '60s

really was a yearning for peace,

a distaste for this war, and

also the self-interest was the

draft.

It's the largest difference,

whenever you analyze what

happened in Madison or around

this country in the 1960s and

the war in Vietnam, and what

happened starting with the 1991

invasion of Iraq and then

the wars of George W. Bush,

was the draft.

Every one of us, every guy my

age, every girlfriend of someone

my age, every mother and father,

had to deal with, what is that

person going to do.

Am I going to oppose the war?

Am I going to go to prison?

Am I going to burn my draft

card?

Am I going to go?

Am I going to try to get out of

it some way?

You know, join the International

Guard, or eating my way out of

it, or whatever.

Every single person, and I

didn't mean to make it flippant,

because it was a very serious

discussion.

It was the fuel of that whole

movement.

So you shouldn't denigrate that

notion of self-interest, because

it can fuel idealism in very

powerful ways.

It touched everyone, because of

that, in a way that it doesn't

today.

The soldiers who come home

today, it'd be as though

the 99.8% of society had no clue

what they'd endured.

There are many serious

differences, of course, between

then and now.

And one of the interesting ones,

which is a positive today, is

that when you looked at the

anti-war movement from the time

of this book, one of the goals

of so many people who were

leading the movement,

particularly on college campuses

like Madison, was to try to

spread it into the larger

community.

That was a constant discussion

about how do you get people

outside of this campus to see

what's going on, and to be part

of this.

It was largely unsuccessful in

many ways.

Today, it's inherently

successful.

The coalition that's built in

the last month or so, six weeks,

in Wisconsin, it's fully joined.

You have the fire fighters,

the teachers, the laborers,

the janitors, the students,

the teaching assistants, and

the professors, and people of

all stripes being bound in this

single cause.

Then of course, part of the

story of my book, which takes

place on October 19, 1967, was

the behavior of Madison police

when they marched into the

Commerce Building, now Ingraham

Hall, stormed into that building

wielding batons and bashing

heads.

Now, in this remarkable

sensibility of today, you find

mostly, the police at the state

capitol, I wish I were there,

but I've heard many reports that

the police were neutral, or

sympathetic, or would take off

their uniforms and be part of

it.

So there was a wholly different

sociological sensibility at

work.

When They Marched Into Sunlight

came out in 2003, I would say

that it was about a time when

Americans were fighting and

dying in a place where they

didn't know the language or the

culture, where they didn't know

who was a friend or who was an

enemy, they were fighting a war

that was started under very

questionable circumstances, and

that no one seemed to know how

to end.

There were also these profound

questions about the meaning of

patriotism, and the role of

dissent in American life.

It was about Vietnam, that I was

talking, but it had a very

familiar ring, it echoes several

years ago, unfortunately, as it

still does today.

My book and these dances are

about war and peace.

The book is a non-fiction

account of two days in October,

1967, when the war was raging in

Vietnam, and the anti-war

movement was raging here at

home.

In Vietnam, a battalion of the

First Infantry Division, the

Black Lions Battalion, marched

off into the jungle on what was

called a search and destroy

mission.

The strategy of the war machine

at that point was to search and

destroy the North Vietnamese and

the Viet Cong and they'll win

the war, just a battle of

attrition.

Go out and find them and kill

them, and it's over.

This battalion marched into the

jungle 44 miles northwest of

Saigon.

Unknowingly marching into an

ambush, 160 American soldiers,

1200 Viet Cong, the First Viet

Cong Division.

The men of that battalion saw

the worst that man could do to

man that day.

Sixty of them were killed, the

other 60 wounded in that single

battle.

At the same time, here at the

University of Wisconsin, the Dow

protest was underway against Dow

Chemical Company, the makers of

Napalm and Agent Orange, who

came to the campus to recruit.

In that protest, the sit down

strike at the Commerce building

turned into the first violent

confrontation on a college

campus of the Vietnam War, when

the police went in there and

essentially started their own

riot.

And in Washington at that very

moment, Lyndon Johnson had no

clue how to deal with the war or

the antiwar.

At the very moment, there's a

12-hour time difference between

Vietnam and Washington, DC,

it was 8:30 in the morning in

Vietnam when this battalion left

their night perimeter, their

base camp, and marched into the

jungle, largely to their deaths.

It was 8:30 at night, the

previous night, in Washington.

Johnson was meeting with his war

council and turned to his

Secretary of Defense, Robert

McNamara, and uttered the words,

"How are we ever going to win?"

Those are the specifics

of the story, much of which

is conveyed in these dances.

But the themes are really what

drive my book, and what

energized Robin's amazing dance

and Jin-Wen's dance, as well.

As different as these soldiers

and students were, young

protesters, on the surface,

really more bound them together

than separated them.

It's the commonality of the

human experience that the dances

evoke, and that fascinate me and

are at the core of my book.

The fears, the questions, people

facing the unknown.

Young soldiers and young

protesters, not equivalent in

terms of the consequences of

what might happen to them that

day, but equivalent in terms of

the choices they had to make.

What do you do?

Whom do you trust?

What are the consequences

of your actions?

Where's the line drawn between

self preservation and virtue?

Heading off to the unknown.

Young versus old.

The young being betrayed

by the old.

Brother versus brother.

Love and hate.

The meaning of loyalty

and patriotism.

And the eternal sorrow of war.

♪ ♪

( applause )

>> That's Joe and Yoko

from Robin Becker's amazing

dance troupe.

Thank you.

( applause )

Dance, obviously, is an

expression of the body.

It's the language.

Body is a language.

Robin and I both, I mean, I'm

not a choreographer.

It'd be laughable to see me try

to dance.

But we share this common view

that the issues of war and peace

can be told so powerfully in

terms of the body.

And when you think about it in

so many ways, I mean, think

of the images that stick in

your mind, that are etched in

your mind.

That naked girl running from the

napalm in Vietnam, the body.

In my book, the story that

haunts me the most is a very

little story of a kid named

Tom Coburn, the youngest member

of the Black Lions Battalion,

17 years old.

So skinny that he could hide

behind a rubber tree about this

thick.

In the midst of that battle,

there were Viet Cong up in the

trees, tied up into the trees.

And Tom Coburn had found a

moment of safety underneath the

tree.

And five yards away

was one of his comrades,

who was being shot at.

Tom Coburn had to deal with

what to do.

Should he go out there and try

to save that comrade and get

killed himself, or should he

try to preserve himself?

He's only 17 years old.

It's an unfair question to put

to any human being, and

especially a 17-year-old kid

in a strange country

fighting for he knows not what.

Coburn stayed where he was,

didn't move.

It's haunted him

his entire life.

When I first called him to

interview him for my book, he

was living in Pontiac, Michigan.

I told him that I was trying to

talk to every soldier from that

battalion who had survived

the battle.

About 20 seconds into what I was

saying, he started crying

and said, "I can't talk."

This was 28 years after the

battle.

So I marked down his name and

remembered that I would try to

reach him again, because there

must be some story there.

Finally, three years later,

there was a reunion of the

soldiers, coming together

largely because I had found them

and brought them together.

Tom Coburn came to that reunion

out in Las Vegas.

The body.

He said he was ready to talk to

me, that he trusted me.

All of the soldiers had told him

to talk to me.

And he started telling me

that story that I just told you

about that moment when he froze,

and how all of these years after

that, any time he was in any

situation where he heard a loud

noise, it would freak him out,

and he couldn't hold jobs

because of that, and people

would make fun of him.

And when he had a job in a

moving company, some young kids

who worked there, punks, would

just make loud noises on purpose

to watch him run away.

He was telling me this story,

and telling me of being under

that tree, and not being able to

move.

He was holding a glass of water

and the glass started shaking

more and more, until it spilled

all over his body while I was

talking to him.

That's the impact of war.

The body.

When my wife Linda and I went to

Illinois, as we were doing the

research, we went to a place the

Peace Hospital, which is full of

kids whose fathers from Vietnam

had fought in areas where there

were large swaths of Agent

Orange.

These children are deformed.

There was this little

15-year-old girl who was about

3-foot high.

She had drawn a painting that

she gave to me.

There was another beautiful girl

who had black splotches all over

her body.

There were dozens, scores of

these kids at this hospital, all

of whom had felt a generational

effect on the body of war.

And it continues into the new

century.

One of my best friends, Michael

Weisskopf, a fellow journalist

with whom I wrote a book, and

have worked for 30 years, went

to Iraq to cover it.

He was in a Humvee with

soldiers, something came into

the Humvee, he just

instinctively picked it up to

throw it out.

He saved six lives and lost his

right arm.

He'll never have that arm again.

The story of Greg Gadson, who

was a football player

at West Point.

One of the characters in my

book, one of the scenes from

Robin's dance is called

Holleder's Run.

Donald Holleder was an

All American football player

at West Point.

He was a major in Vietnam.

He was in a helicopter when this

ambush got underway.

He landed the helicopter and

started running instinctively

toward the trouble.

He got shot down, running just

as he did as a quarterback for

the Army football team.

Thirty years later, Greg Gadson,

another great football player

from West Point is in Iraq.

In 2007, a roadside bomb goes

off, he loses both legs and one

arm.

He sort of became adopted by the

Black Lions who I had written

about in this book.

So, I go to visit Greg

at Walter Reed.

An incredible survivor, this

powerful black man from

Virginia, who had gone off to

fight in Iraq, and gave two legs

and an arm.

Just seeing him all the times I

did was a constant reminder of

war in the body.

I thought I'd turned Greg into a

Packers fan because I gave him a

copy of my Lombardi book.

I don't know if any of you

remember, but the next year when

the Packers played the New York

Giants in the NFL-NFC

championship game, Greg Gadson

is on the Giants' sideline,

their good luck charm.

So, I've always blamed him for

that loss.

The body and Walter Reed.

Two of my great friends at the

Washington Post, who I edited,

Dana Priest and Anne Hull, spent

many months going over to a

certain part of Walter Reed.

This is a vast medical center in

Washington.

Terrific medical care.

Greg Gadson was alive because of

the medical care, and how it's

changed since the era of

Vietnam.

He would've died in Vietnam.

So many of these soldiers in the

modern wars come home with these

incredible wounds.

Wounds of the body and of the

soul.

So Walter Reed was great at

fixing them.

And then it could care less

about them, after that first

moment, if they're no longer of

any use to the Army, to the

military machine.

So there was this whole quarter

of Walter Reed Medical Center

that people didn't know about,

where they were warehousing,

essentially, these soldiers who

weren't ready to go back into

the military, were not ready to

go home, still recovering from

their wounds.

They were living in a hell hole

that had mold on the walls.

There were mice droppings

everywhere.

That series of stories really

exposed decades of hypocrisy, of

sort of the military right wing

seizing the issue of patriotism

and making it theirs.

And it was all fine, except when

the soldiers were of no use to

them anymore, then they were

housed at Walter Reed in this

godforsaken place.

And it was the body.

In 1967, Lyndon Johnson

was president.

Today, the president

is Barack Obama.

I'm writing a book

about Barack Obama.

I wrote a book in which LBJ

was a character.

It's fascinating and haunting to

me that really, Barack Obama is

president.

He wouldn't be president if not

for Lyndon Johnson.

We all have these contradictions

in us.

But it was exactly on Barack

Obama's third birthday, August

4, 1964, that the Senate passed

the final version of the Civil

Rights Act that made Barack

Obama possible.

It was that signing of that bill

on Barack Obama's birthday, when

Johnson turned to his aid Bill

Moyers and said, "We've lost.

The democratic party has lost

the country for a generation,"

which for the most part

turned out to be true.

But it also produced, all those

years later, the first black

president in American history.

If you don't count Bill Clinton.

( laughter )

Despite all the falsehoods

and mythology, and boy,

do I get bombarded with it,

that the right wing has spread

about Obama, the birthers

and the whole notion

of where he was born.

I've been to Kenya.

He wasn't born there.

I've been to Hawaii.

To believe that he was not

born in Hawaii, you would

have to believe that there was

a conspiracy involving

the newspapers in Honolulu

in August, 1961, that they knew

that this person was going to

grow up to be the first black

president of the United States,

and that he really wasn't born

there, so we're just going to

pretend, that we should put

his birth announcement

in the newspaper.

Anyway, despite all of those

falsehoods, Barack Obama did

grow up in Hawaii in a very

different milieu than the

people of my generation, the

post-war baby boom generation.

He did grow up with a liberal,

antiwar mother, although she was

not in the United States for a

lot of the '60s, she was in

Indonesia.

But he also grew up in Honolulu.

A black kid in a place where

there were very few other

African Americans.

And the only other ones were in

the military at Hickam Air Force

Base, and at Schofield Barracks,

Pearl Harbor.

So Barack Obama was never

anti-military.

His first instinct was to see

the military as a place that was

something where people of his

color could go.

Many people supported him in the

2008 election, I'm sure people

in this room, because of what he

did in 2003, when he, in

Chicago, at the Federal Plaza,

gave a speech opposing the war

in Iraq before it started, the

downtown rally in Chicago.

But Barack Obama was very

cautious when he appeared at

that rally.

He was worried that his words

would be misinterpreted.

His first words in that speech

were, "Let me begin by saying

that although this has been

billed as an antiwar rally,

I stand before you as someone

who is not opposed to war

in all circumstances."

And he used that refrain

throughout the speech.

"I don't oppose all wars."

He went on to talk about the

civil war that drove away the

scourge of slavery, and World

War II, where his grandfather

fought against the Nazis,

and two of his great uncles,

including one who walked into

one of the concentration camps,

Ohrdruf, right after it was

liberated.

Then going into Afghanistan and

9/11, he supported those, too.

We're still in Afghanistan,

ten years later.

That's 2-1/2 times the length

of World War II

and of the Civil War,

we've been in Afghanistan.

Obama's entire life, as I've

studied it, has been an effort

to avoid traps.

He avoided the trap of life

without a father, his Kenyan

father and mother really never

lived together, not even for the

two years that you think they

might've.

His father was never there.

He avoided the trap of being

born what in Hawaii they call a

"Hapa," a mixed race kid, on an

island further away from any

land mass than anywhere in the

world.

He avoided the trap of being

black in a white dominated

society.

The traps of the anger that can

overwhelm a young black man in

this society.

The traps of politics in

Chicago, which is by definition

a trap, and the politics of

Springfield, Illinois, and of

Washington, DC.

But the traps of war are so

different from all of those

others.

And he hasn't shown yet that

he's figured out how to avoid

these traps or get around them.

From my study of him, I've said

for two years that I thought he

would figure it out.

And now to be honest, I just

don't know.

It's a very difficult situation

for him.

One of the differences between

now and 1967 is the regard that

all of us, whether we opposed

the war in Afghanistan, the war

in Iraq, any wars that are going

on now, the regard that we give

the soldiers.

It wasn't that way in the

Vietnam War.

And any Vietnam vet will tell

you.

You know, whether they got spit

on when they came home, some of

that is mythology, but it's real

in the sense that it represents

the sensibility that they felt

they were facing, that the

country could not care less

about them.

That's changed, and that's great

and very important.

It's important to the body of

these soldiers, to their souls.

But there's a way to honor

soldiers without falling into

the trappings of militaristic

nationalism.

That's something that, in my

opinion, this university's most

brilliant history professor

ever, George Mosse, wrote about

so powerfully.

It was an essay he wrote that I

found, and it's in my book,

about military cemeteries.

He wrote, "What then are the

ways in which the tragic reality

of war was made manageable and

acceptable.

Central to the confrontation

with mass death, was the cult of

the fallen soldier.

And like all the sacred in our

civilization, it was not

something new or invented for

the purpose, but based upon

ancient religious feeling, the

adaptation of Christian piety to

the war experience.

The death of the fallen, their

sacrifices for the nation, was

often linked to the passion and

resurrection of Christ.

This was symbolized, for example

by the design of English war

cemeteries, all of which contain

the cross of sacrifice, the

cross upon which a sword was

superimposed.

Sometimes, such a cross faced a

chapel of resurrection.

Such linking of national

sacrifice and Christian

sacrifice no doubt made it

easier to come to terms with the

tragedy of war.

Military cemeteries symbolized

this confrontation with mass

death.

As places of national and

Christian worship, they made it

easier to accept death by

transcending it.

But even while continuing to

honor the memory of the fallen,

we must never lose our horror,

never try to integrate war and

its consequences into our

longing for the sacred.

If we confront mass death

naked," as these dances do and

will, "stripped of all myth, we

may finally have more of a

chance to avoid making the

devil's pact with that

aggressive nationalism, whose

blood trail marked our century."

That was George Mosse

writing in the 1960s.

And it still prevails today.

So blessed are the peacemakers

and the dancers.

Thank you very much.

( applause )