Shaun Illingworth: This begins and oral history interview with Richard A. Levao, on March 2, 2021. I am Shaun Illingworth. I am currently in Hightstown, New Jersey. Would you mind just saying what city you are in now?
Richard Levao: Kingwood Township, which has no mailbox, no post office, no central office. If you were to mail something to me, I rent a post office box in Frenchtown because Kingwood is a lot of farms.
SI: To begin, can you tell me where and when you were born?
RL: I was born on November 14, 1948, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, the hospital at which Jimmy Cagney died, my favorite Hollywood actor, and just about five hours after Prince Charles was born in England.
SI: Wow. Can you tell me a little bit about your life prior to entering Rutgers as a freshman, whatever you feel like sharing?
RL: Yes. I was raised in Washington Heights, and my family moved in 1960 to Tenafly. I attended public schools, junior high school and high school in Tenafly. I started at Rutgers [in 1966]. Back then, it was the College of Arts and Sciences. Later, it became Rutgers College and later it became the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but when I went there, it was the College of Arts and Sciences. I received my bachelor's degree in 1970 and majored in political science. I was a Henry Rutgers Scholar under Ross Baker. I was Ross's first Henry Rutgers student. I was the president of the student government. They used to call us student body president, which is a misnomer because that was only for the College of Arts and Sciences, later Rutgers College. It did not include Douglass College or the College of Agriculture or Engineering, but I was the student body president. I graduated with high honors and went on to the Cornell Law School, which I attended from 1970 to 1973.
SI: What attracted you to Rutgers?
RL: My high school guidance counselor, a woman by the name of Ruth Hensel, who was six-foot-four and a ferocious-looking person--she must've played basketball at some earlier stage in her life--told my father and my mom that my brother and I were excellent students and we could probably get in anywhere, which was not quite true, but that if we went to Rutgers, two could go for the price of one. My father asked me if I minded going to Rutgers. I said, "No." He said, "We should drive down there." I drove down there with my father. I said, "Looks good to me," and that was it. It was the only school to which either of us applied. We both got in early admission, and that was that. My dad had been a student at CCNY [City College of New York], to which he commuted every day by bus from Harlem, where his parents lived, and it was a concrete campus and he took a bus back every day. When he saw Rutgers and he saw the playing fields and he saw the dormitories, he said, "You've landed in heaven. You're going to Rutgers at half price." So, it looked like a real college.
I went there, and while I was there, I was very active in several political movements. I was the representative to the National Student Association. I got to see a lot of campuses, and not for a single minute did I ever regret going to Rutgers. I thought Rutgers was a spectacular place. It was a little large even then, there was a lot of students, but I had fabulous faculty members. I had exciting fellow students. I had a great time in student government. It was centrally located, although back then I was not brave enough to go into New York regularly. I liked to stay close to where I was living in a residence hall. That's what attracted me to Rutgers. It had the courses that I wanted. I also had some dreams of going into broadcasting and acting. I never got into the acting side, but I did some work on WRSU back before it was WRSU-FM. I satisfied myself with that. Four years later, I walked with my degree. That's why I went to Rutgers. Actually, I had thought about, when I first went to Rutgers, not really being decided. My twin brother was very interested in philosophy and literature. I was more interested in current events, as we called it then, and civics, and so political science seemed to make that work. I also had several courses in philosophy and foreign languages and so forth. So, it all held together for me. I was very pleased and honored to be at Rutgers.
SI: Do any memories stand out from your first few days and weeks on campus, what that adjustment was like?
RL: Well, I did go through that horrible speech they used to give when you went to the gym--which nobody seems to know this, but it's Rockafeller Hall, by the way, but not spelled the way the John D. Rockefeller family [spells their name], it was a different family--Rockafeller Hall, the old gym on College Avenue, when we all sat in folding chairs, and one of the members of the academic dean's did the, "Look to your left, look to your right. Within one year, one of you won't be here, and in four years, two of you won't be here," basically saying, "Work hard or you're going to flunk out." Today, we know that you don't do things like that to students, but I won't forget that and I'm thinking, "What a terrible way to welcome somebody to school." [laughter] That stood out.
Also what stood out to me was having a chance to meet some of the deans very early and how impressed I was with then Dean of Men Howard Crosby, whom I grew to know very well in later years. In fact, even twenty years later, when Howard was in very bad physical condition, congestive heart failure, and had suffered a number of setbacks, I was one of his small coterie that every couple months or so we'd take him to a Broadway show because he loved Broadway and he couldn't navigate public transportation into New York anymore. I was also very impressed with Reg Bishop, who was the Dean of Academic Affairs. In my first week of classes, I absolutely was knocked over by someone in the History Department named Donald Weinstein, who later went on to great prominence in history at another university. He was a tremendous lecturer, and that impressed me. [Editor's Note: Howard J. Crosby was a long-time administrator at Rutgers, including nineteen years as the Dean of Men and later Dean of Students before his retirement in 1983. George Reginald "Reg" Bishop, Jr. served as the Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.]
SI: Coming to Rutgers in 1966, this would have been one year after the Eugene Genovese controversy.
RL: Yes, yes.
SI: Was that something you knew about, or was that discussed at all before you came to Rutgers?
RL: No, it really wasn't. When I was in high school, we discussed Vietnam in general. Most of what the kids were interested in going on to study or read was something of the order of Time and Newsweek, which were quite strongly in favor of the war. Also, I would say, every once in a while, I'd look at things like the publication of Foreign Affairs quarterly, which sometimes had some dissenting points of view. But other than the general debate, most of us had mixed feelings. I grew up in a town, Tenafly, which was ninety-nine percent Republican, so much so that whenever we had debates on any issues--I was on the debate team in high school--I was always chosen to speak because there were only three Democrats we could identify. One was my twin brother, who didn't like politics at all, but he sort of was a Democrat, me, and I was interested in politics a fair amount, and one other student who decided he would become a Marxist when he was in high school because his grandfather was a Marxist. So, it was up to me. You couldn't tell Democrat versus Republican; there was bipartisan support for the war, at least in '65.
In '66, I ran into people, like Students for a Democratic Society, but in '66, that was really before it started breaking off into Worker Student Alliance and the Weathermen and those sort of splinter groups, which were very, very aggressively anti-war and also very anti-capitalist. I was not in SDS. I would say, if I were pressed, I would say [I was an] Adlai Stevenson Democrat. Adlai Stevenson, as you probably recall, was more sort of an early peacenik in the 1950s. I was not pro-military, but I had not taken any firm stand on the war. The Genovese thing was ancient history by the time we got there, although later it became more prominent, particularly when, as I recall it and I may have our chronology somewhat mixed up, in 1965, Richard Hughes ran for reelection for governor. Was it Charlie Sandman who ran against him? I don't recall. [Editor's Note: Eugene Genovese (1930-2012), a scholar of slavery and the American South, served as a history professor at Rutgers from 1963 to 1967. On April 23, 1965, at a teach-in at Scott Hall dedicated to discussing U.S. foreign policy in Vietnam, Genovese declared, "Those of you who know me know that I am a Marxist and a Socialist. Therefore, unlike most of my distinguished colleagues here this morning, I do not fear or regret the impending Viet Cong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it." Amidst the firestorm of controversy that ensued, Rutgers President Mason Gross, with the support of the faculty, resisted public pressure to dismiss Genovese and staunchly defended the principle of academic freedom. Genovese's statements became a campaign issue in the 1965 New Jersey gubernatorial race, with the Republican candidate, New Jersey Senator Wayne Dumont, demanding Genovese's removal and incumbent Governor Richard J. Hughes supporting the University's decision. Genovese later resigned and moved to Canada, where he taught at Sir George Williams University. Subsequent teach-ins occurred in the fall of 1965 and continued in 1966.]
SI: I think it was Wayne Dumont.
RL: Wayne Dumont, okay. Yes, that's right. His son was a judge when I got older. At that time, the Republican Party started a "Rid Rutgers of Reds" plan, which was taken up by the Young Republican Club at Rutgers. The "Rid Rutgers of Reds" bumper sticker started to appear, and I think it split a lot of students because we felt that political interference at Rutgers, no matter where you stood politically, would lead to no good end. It would damage the Rutgers reputation and the value of the Rutgers degree. In addition, let's see, there was another issue, because I mentioned Reginald Bishop, who was an academic dean, a number of students believed that he was pro-war. Some of the wise guys printed up--and wise guys because Rutgers College was all male then--posters that said "Rid Rutgers of Reg," as a play on "Rid Rutgers of Reds." But it really wasn't that big an issue.
When I had Lloyd Gardner, I guess, in my junior year, I came to know that it was Lloyd who had organized the teach-ins--Lloyd called himself a Midwestern isolationist, I think he was joking why he was anti-war--and Warren Susman, who was a very dynamic lecturer and popular with students. I never, I'm sorry to say, had him as a professor because his field was a combination of history and intellectual history. He supposedly was a very undergraduate-oriented guy. He did not believe in difficult-to-comprehend philosophy theories of history but getting students excited and interested in the study of history. It was during his speech that Eugene Genovese came up as a guest speaker, and it was Genovese who created the, as you probably remember, I'm sure you do, "I don't fear a Viet Cong victory, I welcome a Viet Cong victory," and that was Genovese. He came up, I think, as a guest of Susman's, who was there as a speaker for Lloyd. Genovese, as you probably know, went on to a career [as a historian]. Genovese was not fired at Rutgers, but he was the target of "Rid Rutgers of Reds." I believe he was denied promotion. It seemed to people, even today, I think, who still remember it that he was encouraged not to stay, so he moved on. Interestingly enough, he ended up being a very popular historian for the far right. I don't know if you followed his career. In fact, he even wrote ... [Editor's Note: Lloyd Gardner is a Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers. His three-part oral history resides in the collection of the Rutgers Oral History Archives and includes an interview as a part of the Class of 1970 Oral History Project. Warren Susman served as a history professor at Rutgers from 1960 to 1985. He died of a heart attack while addressing the national convention of the Organization of American Historians in Minneapolis. The Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching is Rutgers University's highest honor for tenured faculty being noted for their teaching.]
SI: Yes, he did a twist on conservative Catholicism.
RL: ... And Confederacy. He had a number of things sympathetic to the "Lost Cause," which shocked a number of people. He never was pro-slavery, so far as I know, but he stunned a lot of people. But, anyway, it really was not that big an issue. In fact, I'd say that the war only really became an issue, and this is a touch of realpolitik, as I remember, the war only became an issue when the 2-S deferments [student deferment] looked like they wouldn't protect students and it became a very hot issue on campus and then went away again [until] I think around my senior year, when the lottery was imposed, because the lottery split the students. Those who had a high number didn't face the draft, and so they didn't want to get in trouble demonstrating against it. Then, what happened is the anti-war movement was completely taken over by the more radical elements because the great bulk of "Hell no, I won't go," that group, dropped out if they had a high number. [Editor's Note: In the Selective Service System, a 2-S classification stands for "Registrant deferred because of activity in study." The first Vietnam draft lottery took place during the senior year of the Class of 1970. On December 1, 1969, the U.S. Selective Service held the draft lottery, which was broadcast live on television and radio. The lottery selected birthdays to determine the order in which men born between 1944 and 1950 were called to report for induction in 1970 during the Vietnam War.]
I was involved in several of the anti-war demonstrations at the time. Most of them were rather placid affairs. Then, that split further when the Students for an African American Society, SAS--I'm sorry, its title was the Students for an Afro-American Society, it wasn't African back then--became suspicious of some of the anti-war groups because some of them were really hardcore leftists who were hoping to promote revolution, and that meant violence. The SAS wanted no part of having New Brunswick Police with firearms coming on the campus. So, that further split the anti-war movement on the campus. I, in fact, attended a meeting when there was a split that took place. It took place at what was then the new Student Center on College Avenue. People like Randy Green were involved back then. I don't know if you've ever talked to Randy.
SI: Yes.
RL: David Burns, who back then was Bill Burns. Rich Najarian, who was one of the radicals, but someone with a sense of humor, somebody who saw the bigger picture. Jim Fine was one of those people who didn't see the bigger picture. I'd be curious to see what happened to him. He was a very fierce guy. Najarian, I always liked. While he was clearly an SDS stalwart, he had a bigger view of the world. As you can see, I'm wandering around a lot, but from my perspective, the war really started becoming an issue in '67, '68, '69 and then petered out again. Then, the bombing of Cambodia brought it back, which was the strike in 1970. That was very closely linked to race because by then, the issues were white boots in the yellow man's land, if you recall those arguments. There was a sense that in 1970, we had to express ourselves, yes. [Editor's Note: Following President Richard Nixon's expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, a nationwide student strike commenced in the beginning of May 1970. The strike began at Rutgers on Friday, May 1.]
SI: Well, let me go back to freshman year, and we will track a little more how it develops.
RL: Sure.
SI: Were you involved in student government right away, or did that come later?
RL: Yes. I believe I was elected late in the spring, when the elections took place to the Student Council, as a freshmen class representative.
SI: Before these more issue-oriented movements came along, what was the focus of student government?
RL: Oh, the big issue, on which we threatened to demonstrate, was checking IDs to get tickets for football games. This is almost like panty-raid stuff. One of the first things I did, I think I was a sophomore, is I went in to see Howard Crosby and negotiated with him some settlement that revolved around students buying tickets in advance so they wouldn't try to buy tickets for non-students, but they didn't have to show IDs at the game, something like that. It was a Dean Rusk solution, a diplomatic solution. That was one of the issues.
Another issue was eliminating the wearing of dinks for freshmen, which was an issue. It was not a political issue. There was another one. I think there was a problem about a junior faculty member who was not granted tenure, but certainly there were discussions by the end of my freshman year and beginning of sophomore year about whether student government should involve itself in off-campus issues. It was called on campus and off campus. When there were demonstrations--and it was not my freshman year, [it was] later--involving the presence of ROTC, that sort of blended the two because ROTC was both on campus but of course resonated with off-campus issues. I think that was 1968. I think that was '68. I don't think that was '66 or '67. '66 was, as I recall it, more internal Rutgers politics.
SI: Does anything stand out about the bicentennial celebrations?
RL: Yes, yes. The bicentennial was 1966, and then, of course, the football centennial was '69. In 1966, Hubert Humphrey was going to come on the campus, I believe, to help us celebrate the bicentennial. I think he decided not to because of all the political turmoil in higher ed. It wasn't anything particular, I think, at Rutgers that kept him off, but yes. Am I recalling that correctly? [Editor's Note: Vice President Hubert Humphrey spoke at the Rutgers bicentennial convocation on September 22, 1966.]
SI: Yes, I think he was supposed to come, cancelled, and then he may have come later. He definitely delayed at one point.
RL: Yes. Then, of course, I remember the 1969 Nixon cancellation because I had a role in that. There's probably a file in the FBI about me on that. [laughter]
SI: You had a close relationship with Dean Crosby, but you were also part of this world reacting against the war. Did that ever come into conflict? I know that Dean Crosby sometimes comes up as trying to, maybe not squash, but keep an eye on student activism.
RL: No. I think the dean was probably sympathetic to the anti-war movement. I believe he was a non-combatant in World War II, as somebody who was a pacifist. That's something you might have to check, but I believe that is the case. In fact, I believe he told me that. His responsibility was to keep the educational mission of the institution on line, and disruptive demonstrations against it were things that he was unprepared to accept, at least in the early years. A lot of people change their points of view. In 1969, for example, as disruptions became more common, Mason Gross came out and supported a student strike and spoke at one of the rallies. Mason Gross said the mission of the institution is to teach and one of the things we teach is forcing you to think about what it means to be a free person in a democracy and that's what you students are doing. [Editor's Note: During the student strike to protest the expansion of the Vietnam War to Cambodia, on Monday, May 4, two thousand protesters gathered on the Old Queens Campus, and Rutgers President Mason Gross addressed the crowd, calling the protesters his guests. That day, two hundred students occupied the second and third floors of Old Queens, including Gross' office, resulting in a two-day sit-in of Old Queens. On May 4 in Ohio, National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war protesters and bystanders at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. In solidarity with the National Strike, the Rutgers College faculty voted on Tuesday, May 5 to make classes and final exams optional and instituted pass/fail grades for the spring semester 1970. On May 5, massive demonstrations continued at Rutgers, and protests and counter-protests continued for several weeks at Rutgers and on campuses across the nation. Mason Gross served as the President of Rutgers University from 1959 to 1971. (From Paul Clemens' Rutgers Since 1945; Kent State University Libraries, Campus Strike Papers: New Jersey: Rutgers University, 1970)]
That's probably one of the reasons Mason left the presidency in 1971. The legislature turned against him. The member of the board, who was Commissioner [Ralph] Dungan, who served on the Rutgers board as an ex-officio member, at a Board of Governors meeting tried to convince Dr. Gross to bring state police on the campus to end the demonstrations that had taken over Old Queens. Gross said, "I will not have state police on the campus. Our campus patrol," as it was called then, "can take care of protecting the property of the campus." Dungan said, "Yes, but the state police will carry firearms." Gross did not respond, as I recall, directly, but I'm told later, in closed session blew up. He said, "You go to an open meeting and you talk about firearms on the campus, I'm going to have your job." Gross did not have that authority, of course. [Editor's Note: Ralph A. Dungan served as Special Assistant to the President from 1961 to 1964, Ambassador to Chile from 1964 to 1967, and Chancellor of Higher Education in the State of New Jersey from 1967 to 1977.]
I say that people like Crosby and people like Gross and certainly people like Dick Schlatter--and Gross and Schlatter were world federalists, if I'm not mistaken--had very limited enthusiasm for the war itself but believed that disruption of the educational mission of the University was something that they should try to hold up against. But once it happened, I think there was a great deal of sympathy. There were two disruptions, as you may know, 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and in 1970, after the bombing of Cambodia. [Editor's Note: Richard Schlatter served at Rutgers as Professor of History, Chair of the History Department (1955-1960), and Provost and Vice President (1962-1971).]
SI: Yes, I want to ask about the meetings and reaction after the King assassination.
RL: Yes.
SI: As you were saying, you were the student representative to the Board of Governors. Is that right?
RL: In those days, there was no student rep to the Board of Governors. I was student body president and I ended up being the student rep to the University Senate, I think it was called then, the first student ever to go on the University Senate.
SI: Okay.
RL: But the University Senate was basically advisory. In fact, there was no student on the Board of Governors. I don't even know if there's a student on the Board of Governors now. There certainly are students on the Board of Trustees, and you're familiar with the dual board system at Rutgers, I'm sure.
SI: Yes.
RL: I've explained it to enough legislators over the last forty-five years. Even after I was President of Bloomfield College, they used to ask me to explain, what the hell does Rutgers need two boards for? I tell them, "Well, the story goes back to 1766." They say, "I don't want to know any more." [laughter] Actually, the real story goes back to '56, becoming a state university. That's where the two boards started. Well, I don't need to go into that. [Editor's Note: Richard A. Levao served as the President of Bloomfield College for sixteen years. The dual board system refers to the Board of Governors and Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees served as the governing body of the university from the time of its founding as Queen's College in 1766 until the university was reorganized in 1956 and state law created the Board of Governors to act as the governing body. The Board of Trustees, now with forty-one voting members, continued in an advisory capacity, with certain fiduciary responsibilities over university assets in existence before 1956. Currently, the Board of Governors is composed of fifteen voting members, with the president of the university as an ex-officio member. Two faculty and one student are elected by the University Senate as nonvoting representatives. Of the fifteen members of the Board of Governors, eight are appointed by the governor of the state, with confirmation by the State Senate, and seven are elected by and from the Board of Trustees.]
SI: Before we get more into these political and social issues ...
RL: Yes.
SI: ... Tell me a little bit more about your activities on campus. You mentioned that you did some work with WRSU. Did you also write for The Targum?
RL: I wrote an occasional opinion column. The Targum was very clannish in the sense that they didn't want student politicos writing for them. They regarded that as impinging on their independence, and in those days, the budget for The Targum was approved by student government as a student activity. So, they were sensitive about it. This is before it became independent. It was a student activity, in the basement of Wessels Hall, I think it was, one of those old, old dorms in the original residential quad. The Targum editors were people like Owen Ullman, Elliot Greenspan, and all of these people were pretty strong progressives, I would say, you might say leftists back then, and I was not. I had moved from being an Adlai Stevenson Democrat probably to being--I never reached the George McGovern, [laughter] but that was later years. I was always sort of a liberal Democrat. I always liked Hubert Humphrey, by the way, even though "Dump the Hump" was one of the chants we made in 1968. So, I would never have been able to work well with Elliot Greenspan. Elliot, by the way, went on to join the National Caucus of Labor Committees under Lyndon LaRouche, which, as you remember, went from being an extreme left wing to an extreme right-wing group. So, Elliot, I don't know what happened to Elliot, but he was a dynamic speaker, a very smart guy, honors student, very, very bright. I knew him to some degree. But the answer is no, I was not very active in The Targum.
SI: What about the radio station?
RL: Yes. At WRSU, I did a number of different functions. I did music. I did disc jockey work. I did news commentaries. I think I even did movie reviews for a while. It was hard to get on there. I only did that in my last year because many of the older disc jockeys refused to give up their shifts to bring younger people onboard. By the time I was a senior, I could only do so much. I was looking to go to graduate school, and I was doing my Henry Rutgers paper and all that. But I do remember that when the college was shut down and the strike, the radio station--which had moved from its old lousy studios into the Student Center. Its old studios were where the Joan and Allen Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life is located, across the street from Winants Hall. It was on the top floor of that, back then, firetrap, but it was really funky. You felt really nice being up there; you felt like you had your sleeves rolled up and were doing work. When the student strike occurred, I did one of the twenty-four-hour shifts, coming in and doing everything all night long about what events are taking place on campus, when people are going to be having a meeting to oppose the war, to support the war, to make up classes. So, I did one of these iron-pants sessions for WRSU. But I was not really doing anything other than commentaries, which were basically five-minute commentaries.
SI: That is interesting. You could probably just look out the window and see Old Queens from that vantage point and see the takeover.
RL: From the old studio, yes.
SI: Yes.
RL: The new studios are, in '69 or '70, were up at the Student Center.
SI: Okay, it was already there by the time of the takeover.
RL: It had already moved, yes. There was a march to take over the Student Center. Well, this is going to skip ahead, if you want to, but in '69, I think it was, after the Student Center opened, there was a period of time in which it had become notorious as a transit spot between Philadelphia and New York for transmitting narcotics between New York and Philadelphia and back again. People were using the lockers that they had. This was an era when it wasn't considered stupid to provide lockable lockers. [laughter] After that, they pulled all the lockers out. They used to put in bulk whatever they were [using to hold the drugs], and back in those days, it may have included marijuana, but I think it included cocaine and heroin as well as marijuana. So, it became a real problem. So, they spoke to the New Brunswick Police, and I think state police spoke to Rutgers about it and tried to get the university's cooperation. What the university decided to do was to have an ID policy--again, with the IDs. In 1966, it was for football games. In 1969, it was for the--'68 or I'm pretty sure it was '69--Student Center.
The precipitating event was an incident in the downstairs [area], where they used to have ping-pong tables. A group of students were playing ping-pong. Some non-students from New Brunswick came up onto the campus, and they used to try to enjoy the campus center. By then, the town-gown relations were enhanced by allowing young students from New Brunswick High School, who didn't have decent recreational facilities, to share the facilities with Rutgers students. It was part of the community outreach, which I thought a good thing to do, but with first the drugs becoming a problem and we had no knowledge in particular that it was New Brunswick people, but with no ID policy, you couldn't tell. Then, there was a fight for use of the ping-pong tables, in which a Rutgers student was punched in the face by a non-student because he refused to give up his ping-pong table to the non-students who had demanded that they take over the ping-pong area. The kid fell backwards and hit his head against the wall and suffered a concussion. It became known as the "Ping-Pong Paddle Battle," the fight over the ping-pong paddle. Because students then became outraged that they couldn't be safe in their own Student Center, sympathy for the open policy changed, and the university, or the college, I should say, imposed an ID policy, which the student government, despite its relatively liberal leanings, supported.
A group from Newark organized a march on New Brunswick to free the Student Center for the people. A group of students in New Brunswick were to join. But don't forget, in 1970, Rutgers-New Brunswick was still not very diverse. So, you're not talking about large numbers of students [of color]; it was overwhelmingly Caucasian. I think if you look in the 1970s Scarlet Letter, you'll see an all-white basketball team, for example. To add to that, to get more Newark students down, the anti-closing of the Student Center march from Newark included a protest to redirect university resources away from the construction program at Livingston College, which back then was Kilmer II and III, I think. It was where the campus is, from the Camp Kilmer days of World War II. The building of Livingston College was to build classrooms and residence halls. The argument being raised by the Newark students was Newark was underfunded and a lot of the funds that they needed in Newark were scholarships for poor and minority students in Newark, although Newark wasn't that diverse either, to be frank about it. But the argument was--and as you will now hear, I heard a lot of the arguments from a lot of students--that the march was to stop the expenditure of Rutgers money from capitalist causes, which included buying and developing real estate, which is how they characterized Livingston's growth, and instead put the money into people, which was scholarships for students to go to Rutgers-Newark. So, that got a number of students down.
I was sort of half-dragooned into participating in the preparation of affidavits for an injunction against the march. I went to Newark, to the Rutgers legal counsel, and swore an affidavit on my understanding of the imminent danger of the proposed march on the Student Center.
I was in the Student Center on the top floor, looking out those long slit windows, those narrow windows they had, watching a group of maybe three hundred students gather in the Brower Commons lawn area between Stonier Hall and what is now I guess Brower Commons. Back then, it wasn't Brower. They had banners, and they were going to march across the street and take over the Student Center. What they were going to do was refuse to show their IDs and demand to be arrested. That was the plot.
We saw a number of green banners unfurled and we were told those were banners of a revolutionary group attached to the Black Panthers, and so we ought to expect that they were real dangerous people. Instead, when they marched across College Avenue, we could see as the banners unfurled, they were the students of the Student Homophile League. Rumors start for all sorts of things. There was some violence, as I understand it. I think a guard--and I think we used Brinks as guards--was knocked over, and some property damage took place. That was one of the disruptions that took place was the march that came down from Newark to New Brunswick, which was very unusual because, as you may know, even to this day, the interaction between and among the campuses is an ever-changing goal and inconsistent, as I saw it. Rutgers, for example, considers itself a single university for purposes of budget arguments--Rutgers brings so many billions of dollars into the state--but when it comes to reporting its academic rankings and its research, it tends to break itself up into separate campuses. If you were to ask people, is Rutgers a system of separate universities, some people would say yes and some people would say no. [Editor's Note: Established in 1969, the Student Homophile League at Rutgers was the first post-Stonewall gay rights group established on a college campus and the second campus-based gay rights organization in the nation. Today, it is known as the Queer Student Alliance of Rutgers University.]
Here's a digression for you, but it reached a point when Rutgers University signed a nationwide petition of university presidents in favor of, I think, additional funding for universities and it was against something. I don't recall what it was. Rutgers signed, with the president [signing]--I think Richard McCormick was the president then--as President of Rutgers University, and Steve Diner, who signed it as a university president, signed it as, "President of Rutgers University-Newark." The Rutgers-Camden chancellor didn't sign because it was part of Rutgers University. So, try to figure that one out. That was, as they say, a classic rosé wine. It was a combination. So, there was some confusion about that. Notwithstanding that, that was the one thing I saw that had a significant Newark participation. [Editor's Note: Steven J. Diner held the post of chancellor (formerly provost) of Rutgers-Newark from 2002 to 2011. Since 2011, Diner has served as University Professor at Rutgers-Newark. His three-part oral history is in the collection of the Rutgers Oral History Archives.]
SI: This is great. These are great stories. It is interesting that this group that you guys thought was going to be this Black Panther affiliate turned out to be the Homophile League, which had just started.
RL: That was only a part. Maybe there were ten students from the Homophile League, but they had the banner. No one else had a banner.
SI: Okay.
RL: Oh, there's another story I should tell you. It was involving that. That was very moving to me at the time. Awaiting with me upstairs by these split windows, looking at these students ready to march, was Dean Crosby, who by then was close to retirement. He was an older gentleman. He was somewhat disheveled and he had what sometimes is called cotton-candy hair, very, very thin. It used to stand straight up; just the little tufts of hair would stand up. When the students started marching, Howard reached over to me and grabbed my arm and said, "My God, someone is going to get hurt." He went downstairs, and he went out between [the two student groups]. There was a fraternity group, largely from Lambda Chi Alpha and Chi Phi, I think, to protect the Student Center. We thought there would be a clash between the two student groups. As the student protestors started walking across the street and were going to march into the fraternity students, you could see Howard Crosby running up and down between the two groups saying, "Stand back, stand back," with that tuft of cotton-candy hair standing up in the air as he went back and forth. Somebody could have easily taken a poke at the guy. He's the kind of guy who when he walked two blocks, he was out of breath. He was quite heavy. Everybody sort of knew Howard. I think there was a real fondness for him, but he was there. I wasn't going out there to march, to stop the two groups. Howard was prepared to do that, and the sight of him might have defused the situation a little bit. Of course, he also knew a lot of people in the fraternities. He was actually pretty close to some of the fraternity leaders.
When I ran for Student Council president, I ran against the president of the Interfraternity Council. I'm sure he had divided loyalties on that because he was never a fraternity member himself. He was always an independent. He liked some of the things that the fraternities did, including community service, and teaching people responsibility and to become managers and to become loyal to brothers and that sort of thing. I think he liked that.
SI: Yes, that jibes with a lot of what I have heard about him. I know he worked to get Cap and Skull back on campus after it was off.
RL: Yes. I was there for the fight over abolishing Cap and Skull. It was abolished by Omer Forrest Brown II, who was my predecessor as Student Council president. Omer has since retired from the practice of law, so he's around. I think he lives down in Maryland now. Omer, who was a very traditional kind of guy, took a strong aversion to honors societies. He started the campaign. He was the one who offered the abolition of it, and it caught on. In those days, if you took what was a credible anti-elitist position, it was very difficult to defeat you because that was very much in the wind. Also, don't forget, Rutgers has, generally speaking, an anti-elitist, working-class orientation, especially since in those days, the story was all the desirable Douglass girls went down to Princeton on weekends. Rutgers College was sort of resentful of the elitist orientation. Rutgers was not really a regional [university]. It was a state university, a respected teaching university. It was not a research university certainly, and it really didn't have that much of a reputation in Pennsylvania or New York, although back then students who were turned down for admission to Rutgers, many of them ended up going to NYU [New York University], which really was a safety school back then. It shows you how the world has changed since '67-'68.
SI: Sure, yes.
RL: NYU was not highly regarded.
SI: No, that has really been a sea change there.
RL: It has, yes.
SI: You said you were involved with National Student Association too.
RL: Yes, how about that. That was very exciting. We didn't know that the CIA was funding the office.
SI: Yes, I was going to ask if that came to light during your time there.
RL: No, it came to light later. The NSA [National Student Association] was, I'd say--in fact, maybe this is the reason the CIA wanted to support it secretly--closely attached to international Socialist and even Communist groups. I think the idea was that the CIA had people who had a chance to look into what was going on, especially since we were in the early stages of the anti-war movement, to see what kind of influence international groups had on the anti-war movement at the NSA. As best I could tell, the people who were there from overseas were so clumsy and so stupid.
To give you an example, the National Student Power Conference, part of the NSA, was held in El Paso. Of course, student groups can't afford anything. So, we were down in El Paso in the summer, where it was 110 degrees, and this was before the era of air conditioning. We were, I think, at one of the UT [University of Texas] campuses, but we were in one of the gymnasiums. One of the plenary sessions was a session that would vote to attack international capitalism for an anti-war movement. We had, as special guests, members of the Polish University Anti-Fascist League, or something like that, whatever its name was. I don't remember its name. In come these guys who must have been in their forties, all obese, with dirty undershirts, speaking English with very thick Eastern European accents and trying to raise a stir. They were sitting at various tables because the small Catholic women's colleges, SCWCs, as they were called, had their own group of tables and then the Northeastern schools. Throughout the plenary session, these visiting were there, and they were demanding that we join forces in this international movement. I said, "Who the F are these people? These are not students." Some of the more radical resolutions were going down to defeat, and to break up--they must have had this plan pre-arranged--they brought in huge blocks of ice with these small ice chippers. I was afraid some violence was going to take place. They started chipping and throwing ice chips into the overheated crowd, shouting out, "Ice, ice, ice." It did break up the meeting, so the more radical resolutions' defeat never went to a vote. My experience with the NSA was that [there was] a lot of ineptitude, a lot of hot air. I asked, "How the hell does this institution survive with this kind of shocking display?"
In fact, the next NSA meeting that I attended was held at the University of Minnesota in January. From an August meeting in El Paso to a January meeting in Minnesota, in Minneapolis-St. Paul, it's telling you how much pull they had. I was told the most loyal groups--because at Rutgers, it's a way to get a student trip and to meet people from other universities--the most loyal groups were the SCWCs, the small Catholic women's colleges. I said, "Well, how could that be? I would think they'd be the most conservative." They said, "Yes, but this is the only activity they have that gets them off campus, so they are really happy to get out and mixing with a group of more liberal college students." It was reformed after the NSA-CIA link was revealed. I think it ultimately crashed and burned, and then it came back again under another name, the United States Student Association, isn't that right? It was USSA, something like that.
SI: I believe so, yes.
RL: That took the place [of] the NSA. But the NSA had some very bright people within it. There was somebody from Oberlin, Ed, I've forgotten his name, but he went on to some fairly active politics in San Francisco. He didn't last long, but he had developed a reputation. [There were] another couple of fairly well-spoken people.
That's where the ballgame was at the time. The NSA had sections on parietal hours, ending preceptors in dormitories, allowing coed dorms, those sorts of things were the, no pun intended, the hot-button issues that got students organized. The anti-war thing came along and also social justice, racial integration, especially public institutions of higher education. Those were in the later '60s.
SI: I am curious, the delegation from Rutgers, how many students would go?
RL: For the National Student Power Conference, it was one. It was the student government president because we didn't have a budget bigger than that. For the NSA meeting (in chief?), probably two, three.
SI: Okay.
RL: What happened is that the schools with the larger delegations were those that were geographically proximate to the meetings, which is why the meetings moved around the country. No one was going to pay for a large number of students. Back then, plane trips were expensive. You had to wear a jacket and tie to get on a plane then too. We'd stay in the dormitory, so staying there was fine. I won't forget, I shared two single beds pushed together for three people. [laughter] So, I spent the evening being pushed and shoved as people were fighting for the blankets. I said, "Well, if this is student radicalism, forget it." [laughter]
Actually, I was, by that time, aiming for law school. It was interesting times, because at that age to really get engaged in something that you thought was part of a larger cause, I thought was very helpful. It was helpful, whatever that cause is. It might be going in the military, something, but something that gets you away from your hometown, that gets you away from a group of close friends, puts you in contact with people from different backgrounds, although at Rutgers, I must say, it was a really middle-class, upper-middle-class group then, very few wealthy kids, almost no wealthy kids, and not very many who were very poor. Even though the N.J. community college system hadn't been set up yet or fleshed out yet, there were very few people we met who were people of minority groups or people of great wealth. The only person I remember having any wealth was Siegfried de Rachewiltz, who was the, I think, the grandnephew of Ezra Pound, the famous writer, who lived in a castle in Germany, so I think he was the only wealthy guy I met in four years at Rutgers.
SI: Well, let me ask about the Black student movement ...
RL: Yes.
SI: ... And what you could see from your vantage point. You mentioned the reaction to Dr. King's assassination. What do you remember about that day and the meetings and teach-ins that happened afterwards?
RL: Well, I'm going to admit that my recollection is a little bit blurred. I think it was Dr. King's assassination when the few Black students who were attending Rutgers demanded a section, the top floor of Clothier Hall. I think that would've been 1968. The headquarters for the debate on whether there should be a student strike took place in a lounge in Clothier Hall that was pretty well jammed. It was, obviously, beyond fire capacity, and I attended that. I say I'm hesitating, but I'm pretty sure that was 1968. I think there was a lot of support for the feelings of Black students by the white students, who were probably the majority in the lounge, certainly in the residence hall, but in the lounge, and a desire to have a series of teach-ins to focus on--back then I thought it was probably more talking about civil rights than it was American racism per se. I don't think we got very much into those kinds of discussions, although certainly people were writing about it then. Certainly, no one was talking about things like white privilege and a sense of guilt about it. Certainly, the civil rights movement and Dr. King were admired.
I didn't hear very much about the link that was being drawn by [J. Edgar] Hoover, linking the civil rights movement to Communist Party. In fact, we thought of the Communists and far left as being sort of a joke in America. Norman Thomas, I guess, was the last of the great American Socialists. Then, after that, it was a dissipated movement. Then, of course, when the Weathermen bombs went off, that was more anarchist, we thought, than really doctrinaire left wing. In fact, I remember when there were wars between the left-wing factions over who were sufficiently undisciplined. The worst thing you could have been called then was an adventurist, which meant you tried to create disruption which would discredit the leftist movement. The leftist movement was not in favor of extreme violence back then. It was more the bombmakers in Greenwich Village who were not really classical leftists. The old fights between the Stalinists and the Trotskyites never really figured in, that I knew, but then again I was not that active. I knew some of the SDS members, and one of them lived in my dorm section, who ended up dropping out of the SDS because he thought it was just dissipating. It had no real achievable goals. So, I guess consciousness-raising, to use the feminist movement language, consciousness-raising was really the main purpose of it. I do have a distinct recollection of a march through New Brunswick, and I think that was 1970, which I can talk to you about later if you want.
SI: Was that related to the anti-war movement or another movement?
RL: Both.
SI: Both.
RL: It was primarily the anti-war movement. It was a student strike, and as I recall, there was an effort to create a movement, I think, called the M2M movement, March 2nd Movement [May 2nd Movement]. It was named after some historical group that had called itself by the date in which it met, probably the Bolsheviks, whatever that date was. But it was intended to create a student uprising about that. There was an agreement that there would be some sort of gathering on campus that would march into New Brunswick against the war. At that time, I think I was a senior, and I had left the main campus and taken a dorm room up at Davidson because I needed to finish my Henry Rutgers project. I was about to be succeeded by a new Student Council president, who was the first African American to become student government president, who was somebody I strongly encouraged to run and I campaigned for him and he won. I'm not saying I was the one who got him elected, but the representatives in all the dorm sections from student government, I urged them to support him and he won. His name was David Talbot.
When we gathered on the main campus, I was no longer Student Council president. As we marched through New Brunswick, suddenly a group of marshals appeared with armbands. I didn't recognize any of them. We were going to march down George Street; I think we were going to march to Douglass. Instead, they marched us around the Middlesex County government building, and we started a chant, "Racism must go." Even though it was anti-war fundamentally, anti-racism was part of that. But as we started marching and chanting, "Racism must go," the marshals started chanting, "Racism must go, Zatinsky must go. Racism must go, Zatinsky must go." I'll tell you now, so many years later, I still don't know who Zatinsky was, except I was given a hint. As we marched around the building--I'd say there were several hundred people marching--I went up to one of these marshals, whom I did not know, and I thought I knew most of the people involved in the march or at least all the leaders in it--and I said, "Who is Zatinsky?" He said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm the Student Council president." Actually, I was the former Student Council president. He said, "Zatinsky's a racist. If you're against racism, Zatinsky must go. Racism must go, Zatinsky must go." I said, "Does he work here in this building?" Even then, I was a wise guy. I didn't know when to keep my mouth shut. He said, "Yes, he's a racist and he must go." So, I went around to all the real student leaders and I said, "This Zatinsky is an employment dispute. You've been hijacked. Racism must go, Zatinsky must go--I don't want anything to do with trying to get somebody fired. I have no idea what this is all about. I'm leaving." As I left, groups of students, maybe fifteen, twenty, were peeled off at the same time, maybe coincidentally because they had gotten tired of marching, but it seemed to have happened around the time that I was talking to people about, "Get out of here. We've been hijacked." So, you might find out who Zatinsky was [laughter] and I might even be misremembering his name or her name. I don't know. But it was, "Zatinsky must go, racism must go." [Editor's Note: Milton Zatinsky served as the director of the Middlesex County Economic Opportunities Corporation (MCEOC), an anti-poverty agency established in November 1965 as a part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty.]
When I left in 1970, all classes had been cancelled and all final exams had been cancelled, as you know. At the very end, the last few months, I was up at Davidson, trying to avoid the nightmare because I wanted to finish my Henry Rutgers paper. I probably could have negotiated a grade, but I wanted to get it done. I spent a lot of time on it, and I wanted to get a grade. Then, I finally got to defend it at the end of the year.
SI: What was the focus of your thesis?
RL: Charismatic political leadership. Half of it was philosophical, the origin of the notion of charismatic political leadership, the notion of charismatic leadership transcending ideology and so forth, and doing a little bit on Max Weber, who had the threefold typology of leadership: charismatic, routinizing and bureaucratic, so I went into that. Boy, this is so long ago. Then, to compare charismatic leaders that I wanted to do some research on, I did Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Sukarno in Indonesia, and Charles de Gaulle. I thought about doing John Kennedy because I had read everything about his being charismatic, but it was obvious, once you got into it, that the only election he ever won, he won a minority. [laughter] He was hardly charismatic. I mean, people loved the charisma because charismatic meant glamourous. Nobody thought he was a gift from God, I don't think. You know, he might have been, but it was a definite minority. Those were the three I tried to compare.
Then, I got the everlasting respect of Ross Baker, who was my advisor, when I said, "Western Society is very hard to analyze from a charismatic point of view," because there were so many cross features. It has well developed social organizations. It has lengthy political histories. It has political parties. It has deal making. I said, "Charles de Gaulle was beloved because he was a military hero," even though he wasn't really much of a hero, except towards the very end of the war. He fought the war in London, as you know, getting on the radio and urging partisans. Nkrumah was widely known as the Osagyefo, which means the redeemer, clearly a religious reference. Sukarno was a great liberation figure against the Dutch and he had universal support until he lost the Army's support because he leaned too heavily in support of the Communists. But I could at least do that in a credible way. I had a lot of fun doing it.
Back before the days of the Internet, you had to get into New York into the Public Library on 42nd Street, the greatest public research library available. Also, I got into the Columbia University library with somebody from the Rutgers faculty, who got a faculty member at Columbia to get me a pass. So, I was reading original sources that were translations of the Dutch newspapers at the time, and that sort of thing was great fun. So, I really was glad to have had that opportunity, and that's one of the reasons I really liked my Rutgers experience. There were people who were generally interested in scholarship, genuinely. One of the people on the committee, who was European, who looked at it--I, on a number of occasions, spelled Jakarta with a D, D-J-A, Djakarta, because the sources I was citing quoted Djakarta that way--and he picked up on it and he said, "Why are you using the Dutch spelling for a liberated city?" I knew that I had stepped in a pile of poop by doing that. [laughter]
SI: Oh, wow.
RL: I said, "I'm simply quoting the source and that's how the source quoted Jakarta. I'm showing off that I went to an original source." He said, "Okay, okay."
SI: You worked closely with Professor Ross Baker on that. Do any other professors from the Political Science Department stand out in your memory?
RL: Michael Curtis, who is still at Rutgers. I think he's close to ninety years old. Michael Curtis turned out to be quite conservative. He's very active in the international Zionist movement and was highly respected, is highly respected. Obviously, he takes a strong point of view on a matter with which I'm not that much of an enthusiastic supporter, frankly, but he was nationally known, internationally known, published a lot, but I knew Michael Curtis. I took several courses with him, and the books we had to read, all of them seemed to be edited by Michael Curtis, one called The Nature of Politics and a two-volume set called Great Political Theories. He taught poli-sci [that] back then was called "Poli-Sci 100." I think they didn't use the 101 then; they used 100. No, I think they did use 101. I take it back. "Poli-Sci 101." So, I got to know him, and I liked him a lot, very English, very proper. After his first wife passed away, I believe he was the social companion of a very prominent feminist civil rights leader. I can't remember who it was but very prominent. So, he traveled in pretty good circles. [Editor's Note: Michael Curtis is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers. He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1963. His wife is Judith K. Brodsky, Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Department of Visual Arts at Rutgers University.]
Then I knew Josef, what is his name, Silverman? That wasn't his name. His specialty was politics of South Asia and Southeast Asia. He also worked with me, helping me because I was doing the Sukarno piece. Silverstein, Josef Silverstein, a little man, a short man, with a beautiful radio voice. When he spoke, you'd look up and you'd say, "This must be a six-foot-five-inch guy talking." You look around, "Who's talking? I don't see anybody." There's this little guy talking. He was so impressive. His specialty, his actual specialty, was Burma, now Myanmar. I was not interested in that at all, but he was willing to help me out on Sukarno, on the Pacific Rim stuff. Also, he played a role in Vietnam, in discussions on campus, because he was very familiar with the whole history of Cochinchina and the Cochin peoples, who came down from southern China and came through what was North Vietnam into South Vietnam, et cetera, et cetera. He had a comprehensive grasp of the liberation movements and the anti-colonial movements. Students always wanted to hear about Dien Bien Phu and those are hot issues back then. So, we wanted to hear about it. [Editor's Note: Josef Silverstein is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers.]
Of course, the outcome of Dien Bien Phu was decided by a conservative Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, which we didn't want to give the Republicans credit for that, especially since Ike was a general. To me, of course, Dwight Eisenhower now looms as one of our great presidents. America's great infrastructure, the highway system, was built by Eisenhower. Not getting drawn into the French Indochina War was Eisenhower. Not becoming part of the great Middle Eastern war fighting to restore the English empire and the French empire with the Suez Canal was Eisenhower. Nixon and Radford and those people wanted us to go in, both of them, both wars. [Editor's Note: Admiral Arthur W. Radford served as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1953 to 1957.] Then, I ended up getting to know personally Eisenhower's appointment secretary, who became my law partner. [Editor's Note: This refers to Bernard M. Shanley, who served as Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Appointments Secretary, and Special Counsel to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, before going on to found the law firm Shanley & Fisher, P.C.]
SI: Oh, wow.
RL: I got a chance to go down to Princeton to see Eisenhower's diaries, handwritten diaries, that one of the faculty members--the guy who wrote the book The Hidden Hand Presidency. He was the first Eisenhower revisionist scholar. There have been others since then, but he was the first. I've forgotten his name, but I got to see them, so there you go. [Editor's Note: Fred I. Greenstein, a professor of political science at Princeton University from 1973 to 2001, is the author of The Hidden Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader.]
SI: Wow.
RL: I knew Gerry Pomper. I didn't take a course with him, but his specialty was American [elections and politics]. In fact, I got to know him so well that in later years, he did a seminar at Eagleton and I was a guest lecturer for him. For Ross Baker, I was a guest lecturer for him almost every year for fifteen or sixteen years in a row on the role of the Supreme Court in a political democracy, the U.S. Supreme Court. That was fun. Of course, you had to keep changing your approach as different justices came on. [Editor's Note: Gerald Pomper is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Rutgers. His oral history is in the collection of the Rutgers Oral History Archives.]
I actually ended up getting to meet a couple of the justices. One of them I had dinner with, Antonin Scalia, of all people, with whom I share almost nothing, but it was social. He was, as everybody said, an incredibly witty and intelligent guy, incredibly. But he was very blunt, very outspoken, as he was in private, as he was in public, but a wonderful person to talk to. I had dinner with my law partner, his wife, Justice Scalia's wife and one of the presidents of one of the Catholic colleges in New Jersey, because the question was, "Who would I take?" and I wanted to take somebody who would never forget, who'd really love meeting Scalia, who was very well versed in theological issues, very, very observant, and a very conservative Catholic. So, I thought, "This would be a wonderful opportunity for somebody who'd really appreciate it," so I invited her. She was the president of Georgian Court University. She turned out to be much more liberal than I thought, but it was a wonderful dinner. It was very, very nice.
SI: When did you come to decide on law school and a career in the law as what you wanted to do?
RL: Probably as a senior. I had thought about going for a Ph.D. or at least a master's in political science. As I got into it, I had some discussion with Ross Baker, and Ross said, "Where do you want to go to graduate school?" because obviously as a Henry Rutgers, he would have some interest in that. I said, "One of the things that has always interested me that I don't understand is why do people obey? Should I do something in psychology?" I had read Escape from Freedom by Erich Fromm, and I had read Power by Bertrand Russell. I said, "I understand the notion of relinquishing power in order to feel power because you share power of the leader." Of course, Bertrand Russell, one of the Bloomsbury crazies, had his own very extreme ideas on that. Russell was a brilliant guy, and we all loved him because he was anti-war, as you probably remember, Bertrand Russell. But the Bloomsbury Group was a very elitist group, and you can't really love those people too much. But I said, "I just don't understand why people do, why people obey. What gives some people the right? And I understand the notion of legitimacy and voting, but how do laws actually translate what people want to do into what they have to do? I don't get that." Baker said, "Sounds like you want to go to law school." I said, "Well, a lot of poli-sci people want to go to law school. I guess I do too." Then, Baker said, "You know I went to Penn Law School." I said, "I had no idea." He said, "I decided very quickly when I got there I didn't want to go into law. I wanted political science." So, I had never really discussed it in much detail.
SI: Yes.
RL: He's amazing. He's a good guy. But I stopped that the last two years; I didn't lecture for his class. I said, "Look, I don't have much credibility. It's been so long since I practiced law, and frankly, I stopped reading the advance sheets. I just read The New York Times accounts. I could bone up and do a lecture on recent opinions, but I'd almost feel like a fraud. I don't feel like I could lecture the students," although I probably knew more about most of the cases than whomever he got to replace me. I don't think he had anyone replace me. I think he just eliminated that unit. Ross said, "All right, if you go to law school and you decide that's not for you, then there's a path back." He said, "I took it." He said, "Go to law school." So, I went to law school.
I enjoyed Cornell much more than I enjoyed law school, I think I love all the schools I go to, but I haven't gone to that many, but I went to Cornell and I was active there too. I went into practicing law for a long time. So, that's why I went to law school. I didn't do anything really political-science oriented in law; I was so busy in law practice. I was one of these eighteen-hour-a-day lawyers. I was in litigation, so you really can't control your own schedule in litigation. By litigation, I mean both preparing big cases for trial and trying smaller cases, so I was on my feet in court.
SI: I saw in one of your bios that you focused on environmental law.
RL: Yes, yes.
SI: While you were at Rutgers, were you active in the budding environmentalist movement or did anything pique your interest during those years in the environment?
RL: No. The first Earth Day was 1970, wasn't it? [Editor's Note: The first Earth Day occurred on April 22, 1970.]
SI: Yes.
RL: Yes. I was done with my college. We didn't do anything like recycling. We didn't do source separation for solid waste. We didn't do any of that stuff back then. I think there was an outdoors club. I think that was the closest. But that was mostly for, it was an all-male campus, so it was young guys who were both thin and physically fit and they were rock climbers. They may have had something to do with environmentalism, but I don't recall that being much of an issue. In fact, in law school, and this is at Cornell--I don't know about Rutgers-Newark or Rutgers-Camden--there was "Natural Resource Law," is what it was called, but those were for lawyers who wanted to go work for the Peabody Coal Company or for Exxon. I'm sorry, it wasn't Exxon. I think it was Esso back then. That had nothing to do with environmentalism.
In fact, environmentalism, I think it first became a major national issue in the Nixon Administration with two bills. One was by Congressman, later Governor Jim Florio, CERCLA, which became Superfund, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, with the Solid Waste Disposal Act and the Resource Conversation and Recovery Act, and then Nixon supporting the Clean Water Act, which created, around the same time, the EPA, if I'm not mistaken. I think that combined a group of maritime, the navigable waters act agencies, and that sort of thing, into an EPA. We started giving grants to clean up. But that had to be in the '70s; '71, '72, '73, I think it had to be. [Editor's Note: The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was passed in 1969 and established the President's Council on Environmental Quality. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established in 1970 by President Richard Nixon.]
SI: Yes, it was either '71 or '72, yes.
RL: It had to be something like that. Then, I became involved in environmental law, later, in the '70s, when my law firm was asked by the Attorney General's Office in New Jersey to represent the Spill Fund, which was the New Jersey analog to Superfund, to CERCLA. It was started by then Governor Florio. The state fund could not be represented by the Attorney General because the Attorney General had to represent the state as a defendant because waste streams from government agencies ended up in a contaminated landfill. So, there was a conflict of interest of it representing both the entity being sued for compensation, namely the Spill Fund, and as counsel representing the Spill Fund itself. So, they asked one of my law partners--I was an associate then, I was not a partner yet--a man by the name of John Francis, whose father was one of the greatest justices in New Jersey's history, John J. Francis, Sr., a great, great jurisprudential figure. They asked John Francis, Jr. to represent the Spill Fund, and John knew me to be a Democrat, one of the few in my law firm. [laughter] So, he said, "You're a Democrat. How would you like to be on the side of the angels for a change?" I said, "Sure, I'd love to do it." So, that's how I got involved in it.
You learn the science as you go. You hire consultants and all that. I became ultimately chair of a fairly large environmental practice group at my law firm, which then was Shanley and Fisher, which grew to be one of the larger firms in the state, and then it merged and that merged, et cetera. Today, it's a firm of a thousand people, and I don't know anybody there anymore. They either have a very small role or they've retired--one of the very best lawyers there I knew for many, many years just retired at age eight-five--or they passed away.
I got into that partially because of my interest in good causes. Also, the area was intellectually interesting to me because environmental law not only creates new law, but it creates new law through analogous application of existing doctrines, which is one of the interesting ways in which legal doctrine develops. It isn't just plucked from thin air, which is one of the reasons I was interested going into the law.
For example, protection of the right to real estate usufruct, that is, the fruits of your land, form the basis of a lot of, as it is, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, et cetera, and it goes back to a landowner suing his neighbor. The landowner had a farm, and his neighbor opened a sulfur factory. Fumes from the sulfur factory traveled across the land and killed the farmer's crops. He sued, and he could not find the right cause of action. In those days, cause of action was really important. There was no trespass. There was no nuisance because there was no specific physical impairment in the land, and the people didn't understand the science. So, it had to find some basis on which to say, "What you're doing on your land is destroying my land and you shouldn't be able to do that." In the cases, which are called the Ducktown Sulphur cases--and I taught environmental law for many years at Cornell also--that's the way you start the case. That's how environmental law started because somebody built a sulfur factory. People argued that that's anti-American because you're preventing a man from using his land in the way he chooses, mainly a sulfur plant. But other people said, "No, you prevent a neighbor from using his land because it was a farm." So, it developed a doctrine of nuisance. Nuisance is still pleaded, by the way, in a lot of environmental litigation, going all the way back to the eighteenth century. [Editor's Note: The case being referred to is Madison v. Ducktown Sulphur, Copper & Iron Co. 113 Tenn. 331, 83 S.W. 658 (1904).]
Building a reservoir, if you're not building a town on a river, a free-flowing river, if you don't have a reservoir, you don't have a town, so having reservoirs were considered very much in the public interest. By containing and blocking up water, you're creating a huge artificial condition on the land. Now, what happens if in a storm the water is released and it floods the next town? There's damage from an artificial condition created by somebody for profit. Should there be liability for that? Obviously, if a lake overflows, that's an act of God, but if somebody builds a reservoir, either for water or to create ice in the wintertime, to chip up the ice and sell it, because selling ice was also a big business before refrigeration. All that became interesting to me, but it was not because of anything that I saw at Rutgers through 1970.
SI: You mentioned the Homophile League.
RL: Yes.
SI: I am just curious if the other students on campus were aware of its existence and activities, because in looking at its history, it started just in your time at Rutgers.
RL: I really don't know. It wasn't really an issue that came up, except on Student Council. There was organized fraternity representation opposition to allowing student funds to be used to fund it. I'm sure there were incidents on campus, but it wasn't important. But that doesn't surprise me. It was something that wasn't talked about very much. I knew the founder, Lionel Cuffie, whom I will never forget. Lionel Cuffie founded it, an African American student, so you know he must have had quite a difficult undergraduate career. He died young, I think. I don't know what it was. But it was not much of an issue on campus, except in student government, the issue of funding it as a student activity was an issue, and there was strong opposition. I wouldn't say there was much religious [opposition], I mean, I didn't see it. There might have been, but I didn't see it. I would doubt that somebody who was openly gay would be rushed at a fraternity. I would doubt that, in those days, but it might have varied from house to house. I don't know. [Editor's Note: Lionel Cuffie was a founding member of the Rutgers Student Homophile League in 1969. He graduated in 1972. In 1985, Cuffie died of AIDS-related complications.]
SI: Did they have to get a charter from the student government? How would that work?
RL: Yes. They had to submit what was called a constitution and get it approved. It had trouble getting approved because they didn't know how to write the constitution. So, we had to help them out in drafting it.
SI: Another follow up on something else, you talked about the Student Center when it was built. I know there was also an effort to get it named after Paul Robeson. Were you aware of that or have memories of that?
RL: Well, the Student Center was entirely paid for by student fee money. So, it had this interesting status as not coming out of state funds or university funds, but of course student fee money is really university money. So, it was originally decided that it would only be called the Rutgers Student Center. In later years, there were efforts made, I think while I was still there, to name Livingston College for Paul Robeson. I don't remember an argument about naming the Student Center in New Brunswick. Newark went ahead and did it, and I guess when that was done, that ended the issue because you couldn't have multiple Robeson centers on the same university. It might even be regarded as appropriation to take the name Robeson. I don't remember; the Robeson issue could well have come up. I don't remember the Robeson issue with respect to the College Avenue Student Center. That I just don't recall. It might have been, but I don't remember. [Editor's Note: The student center at Rutgers-Newark is named the Paul Robeson Campus Center. At Rutgers-New Brunswick, the Paul Robeson Cultural Center was established in 1969 as the "Black House" at 17 Bartlett Street on College Avenue. In 1972, it was renamed in honor of Paul Robeson. Since 1992, it has been located on the Busch Campus, adjacent to the Busch Student Center.]
SI: I have been asking people in general, were you aware of Robeson and his connection to Rutgers during your time as an undergraduate?
RL: Yes, yes. Even in the literature, the football literature, there'd occasionally be, on the anniversary of whatever it was, that he was a superb scholar, et cetera, et cetera and all that. But there was not very much discussion of his treatment at Rutgers or his feelings about Rutgers, and there was certainly no discussion at all, back then, about the controversial years of his identifying with Marxism. In fact, in later years, I got to meet his son, Paul Robeson, Jr., who came to the campus a number of times and attended football games in the president's lounge.
SI: Let us talk a little bit more about the strike and those events in the spring of 1970. You mentioned trying to buckle down and get your thesis done.
RL: Yes.
SI: Does anything stand out about those days, particularly with the takeover of Old Queens and that sort of thing?
RL: Well, I do remember, let me start with one meeting and there may have been a dozen such meetings, but I was present at one in which I did play a role and which was a meeting in the brand-new Student Center. It was upstairs on the third floor in what was then open space. I don't know what there's now. It involved a significant number of students from SAS and, I believe, SDS. I don't know if they were Weathermen or unaffiliated, but there were a lot of students there. The discussion was--should this nonviolent demonstration resort to passive resistance or just be a march? As I recall, the African American students were concerned about who was going to be in passive resistance and what they were going to stop. Would they sit down in the middle of the street? Would they block traffic, that sort of thing. As part of that discussion, one of the radicals, probably from SDS, was speaking about, "What is all this passive BS? People are dying overseas, and you're worried about there being a little violence. I'd say, let there be violence. Let the world see what injustice looks like." I was still a recognizable figure, even though I think I was no longer president then. There was a back and forth. I think there was a great reluctance to do anything like that, but there were some radicals who were arguing--again, not African American students, but white students. I said, "I can assure you that if New Brunswick Police come on this campus ready to fire, it will not be a white face in their sights." There was sort of a murmuring, and then there were other comments, that I did not make, that others made, "Yes, you guys want to see violence because you're not going to pay the price. We're going to pay the price." Was that a decisive meeting? I don't know, but I certainly remember it because it was the kind of thing you leave the meeting head to toe in perspiration, thinking someone knows where you live in the residence hall and you're going to pay the price later. But nobody ever followed up to do any violence. I do remember that meeting quite clearly. That was one incident.
There was another incident, in which I was involved, in which there was a meeting at Scott 135 or 123, I don't remember, one of those big horrible lecture halls that were built in Scott Hall, terrible wooden seats. They've replaced the wooden seats, but they were no more comfortable the last time I was there. There was a combination town-student meeting to take a vote on something. I don't remember what it was, probably a march or something, and they wanted a parliamentarian to keep order because people kept interrupting one another. Without my raising my hand, I was elected parliamentarian. I went up to the front of the room as parliamentarian. Also, it was helpful that I had not been that outspoken about it. I was just there as more of an observer. The issue came up during a vote as to who could vote for a student march off campus. Should it be just the people in the room who were students, or should it be everyone who came to the meeting? [It] looked like, to me anyway, it was maybe two-third students and one-third non-student. As parliamentarian, I ruled that the non-students were observers, certainly welcome to speak, certainly welcome to be persuasive, but if you want something in the name of the students, it had to be the students who made the vote or the vote would be meaningless. At that point, there was an uproar from a leadership group of the non-students, who said, "This is exactly what we'd expect from elitists and this is invalid and this meeting is bullshit." They said, "As forth from this day," and whatever the date was, I don't recall if it was May 2nd or March 2nd or March 20th, whatever it was, within fifteen minutes, there were placards, maybe they were drawn with magic markers or they anticipated this would happen and they came prepared, the M2M movement, or whatever it was, "We are the M2M movement. Anybody who's against this elitist bullshit, come with us to Scott 135," the other [lecture hall], whatever it was. So, the meeting broke up there. I forgot that, because that was a meeting in which I played some role, but it was as a parliamentarian, although the parliamentarian, as you may have read, made a big difference in the Senate. [Editor's Note: The May 2nd Movement (M2M) was a campus-based anti-war organization that originally formed from elements of the Progressive Labor Party.]
SI: Yes, in the news.
RL: It could not be treated as a reconciliation matter because it wasn't a spending matter. It was a regulatory matter. Probably the right ruling, but being a Democrat, I like to say Mitch McConnell had his way playing games with parliamentary procedure, now it's our turn. But he was probably right, yes, certainly justifiable. [Editor's Note: This refers to the legislative process reconciliation that is used to enact legislation on taxing and spending in the U.S. Senate with only a majority.]
SI: Would you go off campus for anything in terms of activism, like attend marches in New York or Washington?
RL: No. The only march I ever had the opportunity, because it was there and all the pieces were together, was a march on Fort Dix, which I decided that wasn't for me. I didn't want to do that. I was willing to express my opinion, to be a part of a demonstration. Actually, I wasn't in very many demonstrations, maybe three demonstrations, not counting sitting in these meetings and then popping off. I was never a leader of the anti-war movement, although I do have a story about the Fort Dix march.
There was a graduate student, at least we thought there was a graduate student at Rutgers, a gentleman with rather thinning black hair but a big bushy black beard, and sort of looked like, in later years, one of Fleetwood Mac, that sort of look. In any event, he used to hang around, and when an older person hangs around with younger people, you wonder what's on his mind. I would see him every once in a while. Once a month, he'd be eating not in a student cafeteria but eating in The Ledge, which was the other student cafeteria for the River Dorms. Somebody came up to me in my senior or junior year, I think it was my senior year, and said, "Watch out for that guy. He's a narc." I said, "Really? He strikes me as being addled." They said, "No, no, watch out." So, I said, "Okay." Then, after the Fort Dix march took place, I talked to some of the kids who went down there, and they said, "Remember ..." whatever his name was, I frankly don't remember his name. I said, "Oh, you're going to tell me he marched too." They said, "Well, we thought he was marching, but we kept seeing him talk to the soldiers and pointing to people in the crowd." I said, "Was he pointing out the leaders?" He said, "I don't know what he was doing, but he was certainly doing something that we will never trust him again." I said, "Okay, okay." End of that story.
I finished; I graduate at Rutgers. I go on to law school. Not my first year of law school but my second year of law school, so we're talking about fourteen, fifteen months have passed, maybe more, I'm in Hughes Hall, which was a residence for law students and I had a suite, which is one of the best places to live in Hughes Hall, where you had actually a living room with a couch and three single rooms. Boy, you were really living in paradise if you had that. Well, I had one of those bedrooms, and the three of us shared the suite. It was a rainy night, thunder storming, and it's like the story of the cat you adopt because it's raining and it's meowing outside your door. I hear a knock on the door, and I open the door. It's this guy, wet from head to toe, with a straggly beard and his hair pulled to one side.
Anyway, in comes this guy from my Rutgers past. I hadn't thought of him in a year and a half or fourteen months, and he said, "Hey, man, how do you like Cornell? I'm really bummed out. Look at this weather, I'm drenched." I said, "I'm fine. Are you a student now at Cornell?" He said, "No, man, I'm not a student at Cornell." I said, "How did you know where I live?" He said, "Oh, you're a famous man; everybody knows where you live." Now, I was actually on the radio station. I thought maybe he knew me from WVBR-FM. I was on the Cornell station, VBR standing for Voice of Big Red, which is so 1950s, it makes you laugh. WVBR-FM, an FM station. He goes, "Oh, I was up here and I heard your name, man, and I asked people where this guy lives and they said, 'Well, he's a law student.' I was going to drop in and just reminisce on old times." I was going to say, "Old times? I ran into you twice in my life." I was on his list. He was probably doing a tour of the Northeastern schools, and I was one person he was supposed to drop in on. So, he came and said, "Man, I'm so bummed. Couldn't I spend the night?" Well, my suite mates were out there and I wasn't going to throw him out. I said, "We have this ratty couch in the lounge." I said, "If you can sleep on that, you can stay here for the night." He said, "All right, thank you." So, he went to bed. We went to bed. In the morning, I got up, he was gone. In those days, I used to sleep until like eight in the morning, nine in the morning. Now, I get up four-thirty, five o'clock, as that's what happens when you get older, and he was gone. So, that was the last distant echo of my Rutgers past.
SI: Wow.
RL: Why would I be on the list? In addition to being on Student Council, the peak of my Rutgers activism was in 1969, the hundredth anniversary of college football. The dean's office--was it the dean's office or maybe it was a student who worked in the dean's office? In any event, let it be known that the White House had inquired into reserving a block of a hundred tickets. As you remember, in 1969, President Nixon was hoping to leverage his personal interest in football to some political advantage. It was known that he was phoning in plays in NFL games. Do you remember this, that he used to do that?
SI: I have heard of it, yes.
RL: I think it was during one of the marches on Washington, it might have even been the one that Norman Mailer wrote about, Armies of the Night, he marched out of the White House and into the demonstration with two Secret Service men, but he was wearing a windbreaker. He was going incognito because he felt so out of it. He didn't understand what the students were up to. This is a digression, obviously, because I wasn't there. Anyway, he reportedly walked into the periphery, where it was sort of less congested groups of straggler students on the outside of the demonstration. He walked up to a young woman. Nixon perceived himself as something of a ladies' man, as history has later recorded. You have all the people in the world, but people in power, you know. As Kissinger said, "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." But maybe he learned it from Kissinger. This woman then reported, she said, "I was sitting there, just waiting. It was cold. It was at night. I was sitting there. Suddenly, I see coming out of the shadows three older men, and I thought maybe they were cops. The one comes out of the middle, and I said, 'Holy crap, that's Richard Nixon. It's Dick Nixon.'" She said, "Before I could say anything, he came up to me and said, 'So, tell me young lady, have you come to stop the war?' I said, 'Mr. President, I'm doing my best.' I didn't know what to say to him. He said, 'Where are you from?' I said, 'I'm from Washington.' He looked at me and he looked down at his shoes and he looked back up and he said, 'How do you think the Redskins are going to do this year?' She said, 'I felt so sorry for him that he didn't know what the hell to talk about and maybe was afraid, but he was brave enough to come out and when he got there, he wanted to talk about the Redskins and I didn't know what to say. I wasn't going to yell out, saying, 'Nixon's here.' I didn't want to say anything like that and he left." In any event, just by way a background, Nixon was known to really love football.
He was supposed to come to the hundredth anniversary of college football. There was a movement led by a faculty member, whom I remember very well. It was a chemistry professor, who led with a couple of other faculty members and demanded that the faculty vote to disinvite Richard Nixon, that he wasn't welcome on the campus. I think it was public. I don't want to name him. He's probably dead by now, but anyway, if anybody ever wants to know and I'm convinced that he's gone, I'd be happy to tell them because he came up to me. He looked like Ernest Hemingway had gone to a dry cleaner and he wasn't Sanforized, he was shrunken, he looked just like Ernest Hemingway with this bushy beard and this big smile and very likeable and his head nodded up and down when he talked, very, very eager. He said, "Oh, he's got to be disinvited." So, several faculty joined him, and one said, "He must be disinvited." I didn't come up with it that quickly, but I just said, "Thank you, but it's the President of the United States and I believe in the idea of an open campus." I said, "Well, I really can't bring myself to do that."
As the master of ceremonies convening the convocation--in those days, I think in September or October, you held a convocation, and the commencement was obviously graduation. So, it was a convocation, so attendance was mandatory. There was a big turnout. It was thousands of kids. It was just maybe a month or so before what was going to be Nixon's visit on campus, but not yet announced. So, I had as my speaker--I wanted a liberal speaker--I had Ross Baker, who had some funny one-liners about Nixon but wasn't radical. Then, I spoke, and this is when Spiro Agnew was still Vice President of the United States. This is before the Maryland prosecutions, which led him to resign in a plea bargain. When I spoke, I said, "There's been a lot of discussion about Richard Nixon appearing on campus. There have been demands from certain groups that he be disinvited. This is an open campus. We believe in the expression of different points of view and visits from different kinds of people. But I will say this, that if President Nixon wants to come on campus and he expects a rousing reception, he has to be prepared for the kind of reception I have a pretty good idea that he's going to get and he's not going to like it." The crowd, I'd say eighty, ninety percent cheered, the only time I've ever gotten thousands of people to cheer me in my life.
An obvious lie was announced maybe two weeks after that that the White House had ordered tickets in order to distribute them to local charities because a local charity and the people involved in them would never have an opportunity to go to the hundredth anniversary of football. It wasn't me; it was the reaction to what I had said. If it got back to the White House and they made that decision, it got back to them because there were people in the crowd who were reporting back to him, and if that happened, there's probably a file on me. I've never asked for it. I've never asked for it.
SI: Yes, I was going to ask if you ever tried to get your FBI files.
RL: No. I have a right to it, but it would all be redacted because it would have the names of [informants]. Probably the guy with the big bushy beard [laughter] was in the crowd then. But I do remember one of Ross's comments. He may not want me to say this, but in any event, he did say, "Everything is public relations now, and what we're hearing about the war is straight out of BBDO," which, as you remember, BBDO is the name of a merged big advertising firm. He said, "The BBDO here is Bombast, Bullshit, Deceit, and Obfuscation." That was Ross's comment. [laughter] It went over the heads of the crowd. He said it too quickly. He was too wry; it didn't get much of an uproar. My comment, one of the things I said that also got the cheer was the reception we were about to give them, "America is led by a jackal and a jackass," the jackal being the president and the jackass being Spiro Agnew. Agnew had come up with all these comments about the "fat Japs" and all the ridicule he had [gotten from reporters], "nattering nabobs of negativity" and all that stuff. He was becoming a figure of derision, at least in the mainstream press. This was before you had a lot of small fringe press, which could get himself heard. Then, you had the National Review, but it was a much more genteel magazine in those days.
As you probably know, Buckley, who was very right wing in the '50s and '60s and an anti-Semite, by the way, as several books about him have revealed, was confronted with a crisis when the Birch Society pushed Goldwater. Buckley, who had become more measured, found that the Birchites were just so unpalatable and also found their anti-Semitism to be unpalatable, and later on denounced the person who ran for President of the United States--the fellow who used to boast about beating up kids for their lunch money when he was in high school--Pat Buchanan. [Editor's Note: The National Review is a semi-monthly conservative magazine that began publication in 1955. It was founded by author and conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr. The John Birch Society is a conservative political group that was established in 1958. Barry Goldwater represented Arizona in the United States Senate from 1953 to 1965 and again from 1969 to 1987. He was the Republican candidate for president in the election of 1964. Pat Buchanan sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996.]
Pat Buchanan started talking about what appeared to be pretty much an attack on the "Jews who run Congress." They have to get the approval from the "amen corner" of the Congress. Buckley attacked him, saying, "I don't know if Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite, but he makes it awfully hard to argue the opposite proposition," which is typical Buckley, trying to be cute and orotund and ornamented in his speech.
In those days, you wouldn't have found a lot of people rushing to Agnew's defense as he started to slide down the shoot. Then, of course, the Maryland thing was coup de grâce. Of course, it was thought then that he might even have been set up because Nixon had enough of him. They tried to get a unity party together with Nelson Rockefeller, but then Nixon couldn't bring himself to keep Rocky around.
SI: I am curious, since you just talked about convocation, do you remember anything about the graduation in 1970?
RL: Yes, a lot of kids wore peace slogans on their mortar boards, which was not really very well-known back then, mark these on your mortar boards. I don't recall any demonstrations. I remember those were still in the days of the massive university-wide graduations in the old stadium, the outdoor graduations. I remember your name was called. It was a long, long ceremony. [laughter] I think there were just delegations from the other campuses and from the graduate school. They didn't get their names called individually; they stood up en masse. But the undergraduates in New Brunswick did it one by one. So, it was a long graduation. I marched up and I remember shaking hands with Mason Gross and thinking Mason would smile and slap me on the side of the head because I had sat in his office a couple of times and we had long meetings and he took me out to lunch. One time, he saw me having lunch with Howard Crosby and Howard said, "Would you like a beer?" I said, "Yes." He got me a beer. As I was drinking it, Mason walked by and Howard said, "You are over twenty-one, aren't you?" I said, "Well, almost." Howard said, "Stop drinking the beer." Mason said, "Howard, give it a rest." Mason, as you may know, could bend an elbow.
SI: Wow.
RL: I don't know if you've heard the stories. Mason could bend an elbow. [laughter]
SI: Yes, I have heard about the martini lunches.
RL: Anyway, he was a real guy. He was a man's man and was just a lovely person. I don't know how he would survive in today's green-eyeshade environment. He was reputed to be not a great administrator, but he was just a real leader. Faculty could look up to him as an intellectual leader. He had written a well-respected book on Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy, and then Schlatter was a respected academic. Even in later years, Alec Pond and Felix Browder were real academics. Alec was acting president. Bloustein wasn't that much of an academic. He had a law degree, as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy, but he didn't really publish anything that I'm aware of. Still, it was a world of academics. In any event, I'm digressing again. [Editor's Note: Edward J. Bloustein served as the President of Rutgers University from 1971 until his death in 1989. From 1982 to 1997, T. Alexander Pond, known as Alec, served at Rutgers as Executive Vice President and chief academic officer, a professor of physics, and acting president (1989-1990). Felix Browder was a mathematician who became Vice President for Research in 1986 and held the post until 1991.]
I don't remember anything particularly disruptive. I know that because both my parents came down, I would have been very protective of them had there been any disruption. I don't recall any disruption. Have you heard somebody had a recollection of a ...
SI: I think some people stood up and turned their backs on one of the speakers.
RL: I don't think that would have been at the commencement itself. I don't think we had speakers. It was much too large.
SI: Okay.
RL: It might have been a smaller collegiate event.
SI: Okay.
RL: Was the recollection that this happened at the stadium?
SI: I thought so. It might have been the governor.
RL: The governor ...
SI: William T. Cahill.
RL: Well, Cahill was the one who reportedly forced Mason out. In 1969, he ran against Bob Meyner, who tried a disastrous comeback. A political science professor, who will go nameless, was quoted as saying, "He looks like a wounded wombat." [laughter] You can imagine who said that, somebody with a real turn of phrase. [Editor's Note: Robert B. Meyner served as the Governor of New Jersey from 1954 to 1962.]
I, in later years, came to know Robert Meyner a little bit. The first time I met him, I saved his pride. I was in First National State Bank of New Jersey in 1973. I had started practicing law. I was on line waiting to use a teller. I was standing immediately behind Bob Meyner. He had run for governor in '69, so he had been known. But he was out of office in '61, when Hughes took over. Meyner walked up to the cashier, a very pretty young girl. Meyner had been a bachelor almost his entire life and married Helen later in life, and still had, pardon the expression, beautiful blue eyes. He was an old man, but he had a twinkle. He had that sort of Germanic charm, very, very smooth guy. He walked up and he handed her his check. She said, "I can't make out the handwriting. What's your name?" He looked at her and he smiled and said, "I'm Bob Meyner," expecting to be recognized. She said, "How do you spell that? M-I-N?" He said, "No, M-E-Y ..." She said, "M-E-Y? M-E-Y-N-O-R?" He said, "No, M-E-Y-N-E-R." She said, "Meyner, huh?" He was really deflated, and he turned around. As he walked by me, I said, "Mr. Governor, what an honor running into you." Well, he gained a full foot. He stood straight up and said, "Well, hello there, young man." I said, "I'm going to hell for this." [laughter]
SI: I just wanted to see if there was anything else from your undergraduate time at Rutgers that stands out.
RL: As I talk to you, I remember things. It was odd that I would forget Howard Crosby running between those two groups, until I thought about waiting up on the third floor to watch it, and odd that I would forget about the M2M Movement, which I remembered later. It's funny how the memory works. I had thought about looking at some of my old Scarlet Letters, but I just didn't do it. I remember, as part of the student strike, or student activism on campus might be a more apt term, we had a widely misunderstood and unappreciated dean of the college, who was a true gentleman and a true intellect, Arnold Grobman, G-R-O-B-M-A-N. [Editor's Note: In 1965, Arnold B. Grobman became the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, which evolved into the Dean of Rutgers College. He served in the position until 1972, when he took a position at the University of Illinois.]
SI: Oh, yes.
RL: He was a herpetologist, which means basically a snake doctor. That was his field, the reptilian invertebrates. He was a herpetologist. He genuinely wanted to know, if this is the period of time during which he would have a leadership role in a major national university, how he could be constructive. I saw him do it on two occasions.
One, he empowered Warren Susman to take a full year off from his teaching duties, in exchange for which he would be granted tenure, I think was the bargain, and in return for which he was to do a full-year study of where we were headed, where the country was headed, in undergraduate education with the idea in mind of curricular reform. I may still have the report downstairs. The name of the report was "The Reconstruction of an American College." It had a red background. It was sort of a red folder. I think it didn't have a spine. I think it had a soft back to make it cheaper. It was widely known as the Susman Report, but the title was, "The Reconstruction of an American College." I think it was approved by the faculty in 1969 or 1970.
It essentially eliminated the very heavy science and math requirement that was the bane of every humanities-social science student, and we all hated those courses, hated them, as the literature courses were hated by the science students. It ultimately resulted in something like a core curriculum being created, instead of general distribution requirements, and general distribution requirements was widely used around the country. The difference between that and the core was you had to choose from a menu of 101 courses or 201 courses, depending upon how many you wanted to take, in each of four or five different disciplines. These were courses that you would take with majors in the field. So, if you took a physical science course, it had to be with people who were going to major in geology or chemistry or something like that, but you had to take a course with them. You had to take a course in foreign languages. That was part of the Susman Report, about how to basically water that down.
The faculty had an emergency meeting, a full faculty meeting, instead of being held in the usual location was held on the floor of the Rockafeller Gym. It filled almost all the balconies. I think it's two tiers. In later years, I think I went back and said, "Hey, this Rockafeller Gym is a lot shorter than I remember, lot smaller." It was filled with undergraduates cheering the speakers for or against the Report. The only speakers against it, as I remember, there were probably a few more, one was Sidney Ratner, who I think was a historian or an economist, and the other was another fellow, Sidney Simon, Sidney Ratner and Sidney Simon. Sidney Simon was a very peppery, vigorous man. I knew that because I was shocked--and the faculty followed--when he did a cartwheel. This was a man who had to be in his sixties. [Editor's Note: Sidney Ratner served as a history professor at Rutgers from 1946 to 1978. He specialized in economic history. Sidney Simon was a professor of economics at Rutgers.]
SI: Wow.
RL: He had to be in his sixties, but anyway, he spoke out against the Susman Report and said, "Professor Susman talks about all these changes. Well, I don't see any footnotes. He talks about a lot of thinking about these issues. Well, I don't see any citations. He's going to screw things up." Well, Susman got up and did this arm-waving speech. Susman was a spellbinding orator, and he said, "If Professor Simon wants to see my sources, they are lining the walls of my bookshelf and I'd be delighted to let him borrow the books and find them for himself, but in the meantime, I would say how shocked I am that in a community of scholars, one scholar would question the integrity of another scholar." He got a rousing ovation for that.
When I looked at the Susman Report, I was terribly impressed, but I read it again a couple of years later and I said, "There's a lot of oratory in here." [laughter] They very much wanted to create an environment in which there would be reform. I rode that feeling into the presidency of the student government because as a junior, I started a movement to abolish required physical education for freshmen and sophomores. I created a committee on the Student Council. We did a survey using computers, the university computing center, to tabulate the answers. It produced punch cards, and everybody thought I was a genius. I just got these surveys back and I gave them to a grad student. I used some of the Student Council money to do the survey. Overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, the freshmen and sophomores responding responded to every possible question they could have, got no benefit out of it, terrible imposition, an insult to them as college students, et cetera, et cetera. The Student Council unanimously endorsed it, and the faculty then endorsed the abolition. I became a hero to freshmen and sophomores, and I got their vote. The juniors and seniors, who had lived through it, never vote anyway, and they were pissed because they had to do it and everyone else should. That was one of the reasons. I mention that because Arnold Grobman was supportive, and Arnold Grobman was supportive of the Susman Report. He actually engaged in colloquies with groups of students, why he believed it and why it's important.
Grobman also ultimately supported, in my senior year, the idea that Rutgers College should become coed over the opposition of alumni, vociferous opposition of alumni, opposition of a lot of Rutgers College students because by then the College of Arts and Sciences had been renamed Rutgers College and they regarded the all-male environment as conducive of the kinds of atmospheres that would produce a quasi-Ivy reputation. Harvard was all male--this was before Radcliffe's merger--and other old boarding schools. The old elite liberal arts colleges were single sex. Also, Douglass College opposed it because it thought it knew that once Rutgers became coed, A, there'd be tremendous pressure on it to become coed, and, B, a lot of the students had been telling their dean, Dean [Marjorie] Trayes--Dean [Margery Somers] Foster was the dean of the college and Dean Trayes was the dean of the women--that they would have attended a coed Rutgers College and not Douglass College because they wanted to go to school with men. So, there was a lot of opposition that Dean Grobman had to face for being a supporter of coed. It wasn't a slam-dunk. That was also, I would say, certainly a contentious issue. [Editor's Note: In 1970, the Board of Governors of Rutgers University voted to make Rutgers College coed. In 1972, the first women enrolled at Rutgers College and graduated in the Class of 1976.]
My predecessor Student Council president was opposed to coed. So, it was pretty much widely around. Many fraternities were strongly against coed, even though many of the women, they thought, were going to Princeton. But they thought that it would mean that sororities would be on campus or they would have to go coed or it would end the fraternity system because they all believed that joining a fraternity was in order to get in close congress with women. This is being taped. [laughter] If Rutgers were to become coed, that close congress could happen more often in residence halls than it was then, although that was probably bologna. They thought it would denature the uniqueness of the fraternity experience. So, that was another important issue.
Then, after that, Douglass did get into a number of difficult issues, but to this day, Douglass has a recognized faculty. It's no longer Douglass College, it's Douglass Campus [Douglass Residential College], and it continues to be somewhat of a rosé wine situation, where only women tend to live in most of the residence halls at Douglass. There may be a residence hall, especially of graduate facilities, that have men living in it. But it specializes in women's studies, especially the Center for American Women and Politics, and the strong women's studies work in politics that comes out of Eagleton is on that campus, the Woodlawn Campus.
SI: Was that something that the Student Council would vote on?
RL: For Rutgers [going coed], we did, definitely did. I don't know that the Douglass Student Council voted on it, and I don't know that the Rutgers Student Council urged Douglass. I don't know if they had any role in that, but they did vote to support it ultimately.
SI: Okay.
RL: By the time the vote took place, those who were opposed to it were pretty much finished. To say, "I don't want women going to college" was hard to do in public, although several alumni threatened to withdraw their support from Rutgers, I was told. But in those days, alumni giving was not a major part of Rutgers support. I don't even know what the endowment was back then. It probably was thirty, forty million dollars; it was peanuts.
SI: I want to circle back to something you mentioned, you were there for the ROTC debate as well.
RL: Yes. I think the ROTC was not that unpopular, but there was the anti-war group that was very strongly opposed to its presence on campus. Certainly, there was faculty opposition to academic credit, and I think academic credit was stripped from ROTC then. That might have been part of the Susman Report; I really don't remember. I remember Naval ROTC used to be called Nazi for the obvious cheap laugh, you know, ROTC [pronounced "rot-see"] and Nazi. The ROTC, I remember there was a firebombing of the ROTC building at one time that caused a lot of alarm that there might be real violence on campus, but it was a one-off event. [Editor's Note: On Tuesday, May 5, 1970, when the Rutgers College faculty voted to support the student strike and suspend the semester, the faculty also passed a resolution to admit no new students into ROTC in the 1970-1971 school year. A campaign commenced to keep ROTC on campus, led by the Ad Hoc Committee to Preserve ROTC. On May 14, 1970, the Board of Governors voted to retain ROTC. Then, the Rutgers faculty voted to take away credit for ROTC classes and shift responsibility for teaching military history from the Department of Military Science to the Department of History.]
Then, there was a demonstration around the ROTC building that I toured with Howard Crosby, and Howard, once again, interposed his body between the building and the demonstrators who were circling the building. They put up a rope line and Howard said, "I'm going to read to you the ..." and Howard had a very, very deep voice, so deep that when you sat in his office and he spoke, if you put your hands on his big conference table, you could feel it vibrate. [laughter] He had one of these basso profundo voices. Howard read the university--I think it was the dissent statement of policy, in which he said, "We respect each other's point of view. We respect your right to be heard. We ask you to respect the rights of the functions of the university, and we wish you will not allow the panic of the moment or the heartfelt feelings of the moment or the genuine philosophical commitment of the moment," it was words you would want to salute, "would overcome the importance of the purpose for an institution and why people of different walks of life come here." It was really a God-and-country speech. It was a speech that Kenneth Branagh would give or Laurence Olivier would give to have his soldiers march off to their death. It was just beautiful.
People were actually impressed by it, and they sort of moved back and tried very hard not to cause an issue. Then, one of his assistant deans, who were much more conservative than Howard, who ended up leaving Rutgers and becoming dean of students of another school, walked by, and if he saw a foot sliding too far forward toward the line, he would walk over and kick it and say, "Get your foot back there." I ran up to Dean Crosby, I said, "Dean Crosby, look what Dean X ..." I won't name him, I remember his name all too well, I said, "He's making physical contact with the students." Howard issued one of his expressions that I hadn't heard before, but I've heard it many times after that. He would say, "Eee," the letter "E" said fifteen times over, "Eee." He walked over and said, "Don't do that, don't do that. They're going to encourage somebody to push you back and then we have a situation." Howard was very good at that.
My class, at least the Class of '70, and even to some extent the Class of '71, '72, during the demonstrations, came from an era in which jackets and ties were worn on weekends if parents would visit the residence hall lounges. We still honored parietal hours. You had a woman in your room, but she had to be out of the dorm by a certain time, and you had to be back in your room by a certain time.
I think that a lot of that is gone, but I will say, in its place is a legitimate and justifiable pride in the excellence that Rutgers has in many areas, many areas, in the math and sciences and in the biological sciences and in history and in math. They're world-rated. English is a top fifty English department. It may have been a top twenty-five at one time. There's a different kind of pride.
Nowadays, and I say that guardedly, many, many more people go to college in New Jersey. They go to Montclair State, which is a very good school, but it is not Rutgers. They go to Rowan and they go to Richard Stockton and they go to the independents, Seton Hall. Also, there's a whole system of community colleges. Given that, Rutgers now can differentiate itself from a system of higher education which is pervasive, whereas in the old days it was basically Rutgers did the higher education job. I don't even think there was an Essex County College. There may have been a couple of community colleges, but they were not really known. Of course, there was Seton Hall and St. Peter's and some of those old schools, but they were not that big. Rutgers was higher education. Of course, I'm deliberately eliminating Princeton because I think half of the citizens of the State of New Jersey wouldn't know that Princeton was actually was in New Jersey. In fact, national polling--I've worked with people at Princeton for many years now--will tell you that when you ask where Princeton is located, number one and two are Massachusetts and Connecticut and [people] are surprised to find out that it's in New Jersey. Isn't that something? That's how it is, of course. No one remembers that Princeton University got its start in Elizabeth as a Presbyterian theological seminary. Do you know its name, its original name, when it was in Elizabeth?
SI: It was the College of New Jersey.
RL: That's right. Well, you know your stuff. They made the mistake of suing to protect their name and they became a laughing stock, although nobody remembers that. Nobody remembers the lawsuit. When they first filed the lawsuit, I slapped my forehead and said, "Unless you plan to change the name back to The College of New Jersey, you let it go, just let it go."
SI: Yes, I remember that when Trenton State changed over.
RL: Yes, Rutgers wasn't too pleased with the name The College of New Jersey, but it didn't say anything. Everybody knew that Trenton State College had to do something. It had to do something. It was one-third empty. It couldn't meet its enrollment goals. Nobody wanted to go to Trenton State College. Even now, there are people who want to change its name back, because of Robert [William] Trent, you get the Trenton name back into it, but I don't think that's going to happen. Maybe if somebody wants to change its name to university, but it could never be known as the University of New Jersey.
You know Rutgers University has gone through multiple names. I don't know if you know that. Rutgers used to officially call itself, whatever the statute provided, it was "Rutgers. The State University." That was its name. The dot, it was nicknamed "Rutgers Jellin The State University" by calling the dot a jellin, J-E-L-L-I-N, because it was a signal that was made up by Jellin Printing Company, which did all the Rutgers stationery. They didn't want to be known as Rutgers State because they thought that would cheapen it. It didn't sound Ivy League. So, for also a number of years, Rutgers would call itself Rutgers University, The State University of New Jersey. But then when the state found out that they were then calling themselves Rutgers University and underplaying its name as the state university, the state didn't like that either. Whatever it is today, it is today. People are so much more sophisticated. A lot of state universities are really very prominent research universities. Now that we look for aspirational peers, I guess we look at schools like Michigan. I don't think comparing ourselves to Berkeley or Northwestern make any sense, but Berkeley is a state university, for example. We are probably better than Wisconsin. Well, I shouldn't say that; that's a stupid thing to say. Wisconsin has great departments, but we are up there. Rutgers is a highly-respected institution. You can see it by the quality of faculty it can attract. It attracts world-beaters, Nobel Prize winners, and the kind of adjunct faculty it can attract.
SI: I have kept you longer than I said I would, so I appreciate that.
RL: I talked longer than I promised I would.
SI: I will conclude for today, and we will type this up. I will send it out to you. I might have more questions that I will come up with, but I think you covered the period very well. If there are more things that you see in the transcript that you want to add to, we can do a follow up or you can add it to the transcript.
RL: Yes. I am wondering about deleting some sections where I refer to names. Howard is long gone, and he has no relatives. He has no descendants, and I think Howard would be tickled to have these stories about him in there.
SI: Yes, a lot of people talk about him in these interviews.
RL: If the tape is still running, I think this is a story about the kind of man Howard Crosby was.
SI: Yes, sure.
RL: When I was practicing law, I would take Howard to Broadway shows. His heart was really failing at that point. He had to stop every half block and put his hand up on a lamppost or on the wall of a building and say, "Now, I have to breathe." He would pant and pant and pant, and then he would stop and say, "Okay, I can keep going." Well, he and I were walking down Broadway, and he put his hand up on a lamp. He started to pant and pant and pant.
As he started to get ready, I put my hand on his elbow to help him walk. A very well-dressed man, this is back in the days when people used to dress up to go to Broadway, and his elegantly dressed wife, probably a prominent lawyer or a businessman or whatever it was, stopped and said, "Howard J. Crosby." The guy was somebody who hadn't aged well. Not only did Howard not age well, but this guy didn't age well. He was overweight, he was white-haired. He was an older-looking guy. Howard Crosby looked up and then said, "Bobby." He said, "Yes, it's Bobby. How are you?" He said, "I'm behaving myself, Dean Crosby. I never thought I would run into you again, but I'm running into you." He turned to me and said, "Do you know the man you're walking with?" I said, "I'm an alumnus and I can tell you I'm walking with him because he's a guy I really, really respect who made a difference in my life." He responded, "He is the reason I am where I am today. When I was a student, I couldn't afford to buy my textbooks, and when I really needed it, I went to see Dean Crosby and he'd pull out his wallet and he'd give me the money. I said, 'I'll pay you back.'" He said, "I bought the textbooks with that money, and I write checks to Rutgers and I send a note to Dean Crosby, I haven't seen him, saying, 'I'm paying back the money you gave me and maybe it'll buy textbooks for other students.'" He said, "You're with the man who's the reason I'm here today as a success." That's an amazing story.
When I was President of Bloomfield College, I had a woman come to me--and Bloomfield College is very heavily minority--an African American woman and she said, "I was required to take the nursing qualifying exam and I took the exam, I wasn't ready for it and I failed, and I found out that I didn't have to take the exam," and the exam was something like fifty dollars. Maybe it was called NCLEX. I don't remember now. I keep getting that confused with the higher ed, to be a teacher. In any event, [she said], "I don't have fifty dollars. I'm working at Macy's and the next exam is coming up in a week, and if I don't take it again, I'm going to be out of cycle, and if I don't pass the NCLEX, I won't be able to take the final courses and I just don't know what to do." This was the year 2000, whatever it was, just a few years ago, and maybe she's going to claim that I tried to shake her down for whatever or word will get out and everyone will line up outside my door. It's a different world today. So, I said, "Look, the Bloomfield Foundation has miscellaneous funds. Next week, go downstairs and see if they have a fund to help nursing students." Of course, nurses who graduate and become successful nurses give money to the nursing program, which is true. [I said], "See if they have a fund for people who need money to take the qualifying exam." She said, "Okay, I'll do that." When she left, I immediately went downstairs to the foundation. I wrote a check for fifty dollars, so I could take a tax deduction. [laughter] I said, "This is an anonymous donation, and you will create a fund for any nurse candidate who comes to you needing money because she couldn't afford to take the qualifying exam. She'll come to you next week." Now, under tax law, you're not allowed to designate who the money goes to because that's paying someone's tuition and taking a tax deduction, and if you do that, that's not a deductible expense. You can't pay your neighbor's child's tuition and then he does your child's, and you both get tax deductions. The reason is obvious why the rule is there. I said, "So, you have to give it to the first person who comes through the door, but tell me who that person is." Sure enough, the person who talked to me came through the door and got the grant and took the exam. I don't know whether she passed or not, but she never came to me to thank me, which is fine because she didn't know it was my fifty dollars. I did that because of the example I heard that guy talk to me about, about Howard Crosby giving him the twenty bucks or whatever it was to buy the textbooks when he needed it. That was Howard Crosby and how people remembered him years and years later.
His obituary was printed in The New York Times and the title of the obituary was, "Mr. Rutgers Dies." I may still have a copy of that somewhere, because I saw it and I didn't know where I would put it, so I was smart, I put it in my yearbook. You can do a time machine search. The New York Times has a time machine.
SI: Yes.
RL: See if it has "Mr. Rutgers" in obituaries, it will be Howard Crosby. [Editor's Note: The New York Times Obituaries section on October 24, 1991 includes Howard Crosby's obituary, entitled "Howard J. Crosby Jr., A Rutgers Dean, 72." The article notes that Crosby was a descendant of Colonel Henry Rutgers.]
SI: I was always sorry that the program never got to interview him. He passed away in 1991.
RL: Yes, he was in terrible shape. He put on so much weight. He used to throw a bash every year for the football team before it became a professional team. He just loved having his apartment filled with these big guys. He was a real college figure. They all knew him because back in those days, he would do the counseling. I mean, you didn't have special tutors for football players. The kind of food he would make for them, he loved to make shrimp toast, which was his specialty, which was just drenched in high saturated fats, just unbelievably bad. [laughter] When we went out to eat, he didn't pass up a steak or a bad meal.
He took me to Sardi's for dinner when I took him to the [Broadway show]. If you remember, Sardi's was a famous Broadway restaurant. There was a small bar in the front of Sardi's, where you would go to get a drink while waiting for your table, and it had all these sketches of these famous people along the hall, all the Broadway stars. It also occasionally would have a Broadway or an off-Broadway star who wasn't active, who didn't have a show, who would go there. Anyway, Howard took me there. We had to wait for our table, so we went to the little bar. There was a quiet man at the end of the bar, and Howard was there. The quiet man looked up and said, "Dean, welcome back, it's been a while." Crosby said, "Vince, it's a pleasure to be back," and it was Vince Sardi. Howard had gotten enough dinners there that he was known by the owner Vince Sardi. That's another story about Howard Crosby.
SI: Wow, very good.
RL: Thank you so much. I will be looking forward to the transcript, and I am glad I was able to help.
SI: I really appreciate it. I will email you when it is ready. It will probably be a month to six weeks. Thank you very much.
RL: You're very welcome.
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Transcribed by Jesse Braddell 4/11/2021
Reviewed by Michael Farner 4/29/2021
Reviewed by Kathryn Tracy Rizzi 5/14/2021
Reviewed by Richard A. Levao 8/18/2021