Interviewees

Shaun Illingworth: This begins the second interview with Robert Berkowitz, on July 15, 2022, with Shaun Illingworth. Thank you very much for joining me again. We were just talking about 1967 in general but what led you into the Vietnam Summer campaign. Please tell me a little bit more about that.

Robert Berkowitz: It just seemed the right fit for me. As much as I believed in the importance of anti-war protest demonstrations and marches, there were limits to their effectiveness. Yes, the previous spring's anti-war demonstrations in New York and San Francisco that drew a half-million protestors were the largest of their kind in American history. The numbers were huge and seemed especially so if attended in person. However, they were a pittance compared to the more than one hundred million registered voters at the time. Moreover, a sizeable number of the demonstrators, like myself, were under twenty-one and, although potentially eligible for the draft, were ineligible to vote at that time. An equally sizeable number of demonstrators were in their twenties. Though eligible to vote, they often did not. The fact of the matter was that during the 1960s more than eighty-five percent of those who voted in elections were over thirty. So, as far as I was concerned, if one were serious about laying the groundwork to make the 1968 elections a referendum on the war, it was incumbent to reach out to those over thirty and to dispense with the popular shibboleth of the time that "you can't trust anyone over thirty." [Editor's Note: The 26th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 1, 1971, changing the voting age in the United States from twenty-one to eighteen.]

Vietnam Summer was also a good fit for me personally. I was far more comfortable in the role of educator. I loved conducting methodical research, training volunteers, crafting presentations, giving them, and moderating discussions. Having previously worked on the David Frost and Carter Jefferson campaigns that involved stepping out of the comfort zone of campus politics, I did not feel I would be entering uncharted territories in reaching out to those over thirty who controlled the voting levers of power. [Editor's Note: David Frost was a peace activist who challenged Middlesex County attorney Warren W. Wilentz for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey in 1966. Wilentz won the primary on September 13, 1966 and lost in the general election to Republican incumbent Clifford P. Case. Republican Peter H.B. Frelinghuysen, Jr. represented New Jersey's Fifth District in the House of Representatives from 1953 to 1975. In the election in 1966, Frelinghuysen won with 70.8 percent to Democrat Carter Jefferson's 27.1 percent of the vote.]

In the final analysis, when offered the opportunity to play a constructive role in helping to bring the war to an end, it never entered my mind to turn down the opportunity to participate in the Vietnam Summer campaign. The only thing I had to consider was how to make ends meet. I was offered a small stipend, but it was just enough to survive. Fortunately, I was able to land a good-paying, part-time job loading trucks at the UPS distribution center in Edison, New Jersey. I received a small stipend, but it was barely enough to cover printing, telephone, and transportation costs.

Soon after returning to campus for my junior year, I was invited to participate in a teach-in on the Vietnam War. The teach-in was promoted as a "Speak-Out Against the War in Vietnam," and timed to take place ten days before the October 21st March on Washington. The event was sponsored by two organizations. One was the University Committee on Problems of War and Peace, a faculty group headed by Chemistry Professor Seymour Zenchelsky, who I believe soon became head of the New Jersey chapter of SANE. The second organization was the Rutgers-Douglass Committee of Conscience, a student group formed the previous March. Founded by Rutgers sophomore Peter Kuznick, it positioned itself as a broad-based, independent anti-war forum for all campus anti-war groups, including SANE and SDS. [Editor's Note: Peter Kuznick, Rutgers College Class of 1970, is a professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University.]

The two other individuals who were asked to speak were history professors Warren Susman and Lloyd Gardner. I was very familiar with them. I had audited several of Warren's lectures on American intellectual history during my freshman year, and had taken the second semester of the U.S. history survey course with Lloyd the previous spring. I was awed by their breadth and depth of knowledge of American history and moved by the storytelling power of their lectures--lectures that were thought-provoking, mind-expanding, unconventional, transporting, entertaining, and intellectually rigorous. That both were passionate opponents of our foray into the swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia was icing on the cake. So, when I was asked to share the same podium with these two intellectual giants, I was greatly honored, as well as greatly intimidated. [Editor's Notes: Warren Susman was a professor of history at Rutgers from 1960 until his sudden death in 1985. Lloyd Gardner is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers. His oral history is a part of the Rutgers Oral History Archives.]

More than four hundred students and faculty attended the speak-out, packing the same Scott Hall where the first Rutgers teach-in was held. I believe Lloyd spoke first. He gave quite a bleak assessment of the war. At the time, the U.S. Marine Corps combat base at Con Thien was under constant artillery and mortar attack. The lethal bombardment had received prominent coverage in the U.S. In mid-September, CBS News broadcast footage of the attacks, and just five days before the speak-out, the battering of the base was the cover-story of Time Magazine. The ceaseless shelling took such a toll on our Marines that the weekly magazine referred to Con Thien as the "meat grinder," and the nearby Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as "Dead Marine Zone." Lloyd talked about Con Thien and the larger war in the countryside and summed up his assessment by saying that all of Vietnam had become the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which, if I recall correctly, he talked about at some length. That was the decisive battle thirteen years earlier that forced the French to end their war in Vietnam. The French garrison in Dien Bien Phu had been overrun by the North Vietnamese. Eleven thousand French soldiers were captured, the French government in Paris resigned, France withdrew its troops, and soon thereafter negotiated a peace agreement that called for free and fair elections--elections that never did happen. Lloyd's assessment was that the war was unwinnable and the sooner we disengaged the better. Given Lloyd's reputation as the eminent scholar of American foreign policy on campus, his sober analysis had a powerful impact on the audience. [Editor's Note: In 1954, Vietnamese forces, led by nationalist Ho Chi Minh, defeated French military forces at Dien Bien Phu, signifying the end of French colonial rule of Indochina. The Geneva Accords sought a temporary partition of Vietnam along the 17th Parallel and elections to unify the country under a single government, but the post-colonial era witnessed two nations forming, Communist North Vietnam and anti-Communist, U.S.-backed South Vietnam. As the Cold War policy of containment compelled the U.S. to oppose Communist aggression in Asia, the U.S. started sending military advisors and financial assistance to South Vietnam in the 1950s and early 1960s. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, the U.S. steadily escalated its military involvement in aiding South Vietnam against the North Vietnamese and Communist South Vietnamese insurgents, the National Liberation Front or Vietcong (VC).]

Lloyd was also eerily prescient. Three months later came the Tet Offensive. Though the surprise, multi-pronged attack was beaten back and did not end the war as did the battle of Dien Bien Phu, the psychological impact was devastating for U.S morale and confirmed for a growing number of Americans what Lloyd had concluded at the speak-out, that the war was an unwinnable quagmire. Two months later, President Johnson decided to not seek reelection. Still, the war would drag on for another seven years at great cost to countless lives and the failure to address our social ills at home. [Editor's Note: On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.]

As I recall, Warren followed Lloyd at the lectern. None of us at the podium had any idea what Warren was going to say, though there was a sense his words would be full of drama and passion. He had spoken at the two previous teach-ins. At the first one, when a professor from Douglass College began to defend our involvement in the war in the name of civilization, Warren rose from his chair, and in a thunderous voice challenged the speaker to define civilization. In a fit of exasperation, Warren pounded his fist on the podium, smashing his wrist watch in smithereens, and sending crystals flying in every direction. At the second teach-in, he launched into a tirade about the growing "Stalinization" of the U.S. government. We were not disappointed. His address was an impassioned diatribe on the utter folly of the war. He referred to it as the absurd war, one masterminded and executed by a bunch of lunatics that should long ago have been locked away in an insane asylum. His physical gestures were as electrifying as his words. I may be exaggerating, but as I recall, his arms gesticulated wildly in the air, his eyes bolted fiercely out their sockets and his face reddened in fury. His unbounded frustration and anger against the idiot wise men of Washington who masterminded a wholly avoidable and absurd war with all its deadly consequences was fully on display.

In revisiting Warren's dramatic and passionate protest of the Vietnam War as that wholly absurd war, it got me thinking about how best to categorize him, if that's at all possible. However, I am reminded of Albert Camus' pithy and penetrating observation that the only thing that is true and valid in an absurd and meaningless world is one's protestation against it. That powerful insight convinced me that Warren was at heart an existentialist who, like Camus and Ionesco, was an incurable optimist who lived life to the fullest despite his protestations against its absurdity.

Warren's act was an impossible one to follow, but I did my best, and the audience was attentive, polite, and receptive. However, they were hardly as animated as they were by Warren's dramatic theatrical performance, or as captivated as they were by Lloyd's masterful insights and breathtaking mastery of the history of our folly in Vietnam. I talked about our post-World War II history of support for corrupt and autocratic governments throughout the third world, the most blatant example being the very unpopular and undemocratic Thieu-Ky government--one that in the previous month's national election had done all in its power to suppress the vote, intimidate opposition candidates and censor the press, and still only managed to win thirty-four percent of the vote.

That four hundred students had packed Scott Hall to attend a speak-out was an encouraging sign, despite the apathy that continued to pervade the campus at large. There were a few mini-speeches from the floor, some pro-war and heated. However, there was no heckling or disruptions, nor banners, flags, or posters. The sponsors of the speak-out did a laudatory job of discouraging such behavior. Their intention was for the speak-out to be a true teach-in instead of a rally for or against the war, even if they promoted it as a "speak-out" against it. It was certainly far more civil and far less rancorous than the previous teach-ins at Rutgers.

I recently came across an article in the December 14, 1967 issue of the Targum that highlighted a taped debate on the Vietnam War moderated by Targum editors that included professors Warren Susman and Max Gideonese, and students Howard Cohen, who was president of Young Americans for Freedom, and myself.

SI: Oh, yes, I was going to ask about this. I saw that.

RB: Yes. A few of the excerpts from that debate clearly reflected my policy position on the war, as well as my sense at the time that the challenges of ending it went beyond simply replacing President Johnson.

One of the questions posed by the editors of the Targum was, "What are your basic positions on the war in Vietnam?" I answered, "My position is that we should immediately withdraw unconditionally from Vietnam so that we might achieve the goals we set out of giving the Vietnamese the right to self-determination of government and ensuring their freedom."

A second question posed was, "Do you believe that President Johnson, rather than say Dean Rusk or the military, is chiefly responsible for the present policy in Vietnam?" I answered, "I think that this is one of the major fallacies of people both in the peace movements and people on the right. I think it has gotten to the point where it is out of the hands of the executive and even the military. We seem to be basing our actions on material ideologies and beliefs on the evils of Communism. These ingrained ideologies determine our policies, not just the President."

In retrospect, I should have been more critical of the repressive and ruthless nature of the Soviet Union and China regimes. I certainly did not fully appreciate the brutish nightmare Mao put his country through with his Great Leap Forward program that caused upwards of fifty million deaths and massive environmental destruction. I also only fully appreciated the ruthlessness of the Soviet regime after it invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and repressed Prague Spring. However, what I believed at the time, and still do, was that in the eyes of the majority of Vietnamese people Ho Chi Minh was their George Washington, and that despite being a communist, Ho was first and foremost a nationalist who had little if any desire to sacrifice his nation's independence to the whims, fancies, and imperial wishes of China--wishes that our military venture in Vietnam was encouraging, albeit unwittingly. However, that fight for independence in no way justified the atrocities committed by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers that in more than a few cases rose to the level of war crimes, nor the post-war indoctrination camps and brutal policies that contributed to great humanitarian and refugee crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Still, rolling the video forward to the present, despite Vietnam being a one-party communist-ruled, authoritarian nation, it remains an independent one with which we now have a decent trading and diplomatic relationship, and one that poses neither an economic nor military threat to the United States, nor is at risk of slavishly subordinating itself to China or Russia. Such then is the tragedy of the Vietnam War. It was all for naught and at the expense of millions of inexcusable and fully avoidable civilian and military casualties.

A big issue that became front-and-center on campus in the fall of 1967 was the role, function, value, and the presence of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) [pronounced "rot-see"] program at Rutgers. Lots of questions were raised about the program. Some questioned the quality of the courses taught, the qualifications of the instructors, whether credits should be given, whether field-stripping of A-1's should be taught, whether military drills should be performed, and whether the "rush" methods employed to sign up freshman during orientation week were appropriate. A myriad of solutions were proposed, from keeping ROTC as is, to eliminating it in its entirety, to a host of ameliorative, compromise reforms, mostly designed to ensure that the ROTC program met the rigorous standards and recruitment methods of all the other Arts and Sciences academic departments.

I was one among many who weighed in on the ROTC program. My position was extreme, but I thought constructive. I did not believe that it was an appropriate function of the University to employ an arm of the Department of Defense to train students for leadership roles in the Armed Forces. I felt it would be comparable to having the University employ the CIA to teach in the Political Science Department with the explicit purpose of training and recruiting them for employment in Langley, Virginia, or for that matter employing General Motors to teach students in the Engineering Department with the stated goal of training and recruiting them as engineers at their headquarters in Detroit. On ethical and moral grounds, I found it difficult to support a program, sponsored and hosted by Rutgers, that was the major training ground for leadership positions in a military that at the time was engaged in a senseless and murderous war. I argued in a letter-to-the-editor to Targum in early October (signed as well by my friend Jim Fine, who at the time was vice president of SDS) that "a prep course in training to be a soldier should not be accredited by the University and administered by means of University facilities." However, in that letter, I proposed what I believed to be a fair, balanced, and constructive military educational alternative. It was that the "educational aspects" of the ROTC "military science program" be incorporated into the History or Political Science Departments, or into an entirely new non-ROTC Military Science Department. For students who wished to avail themselves of courses in field military training, there was always the option of applying to the U.S. Army Officer Candidate School that trained, assessed, and evaluated potential command officers for the U.S. Army Reserve and Army National Guard. A vocal minority of faculty and students supported like-minded ways to eliminate the campus ROTC program.

The strongest objection to doing away with the campus ROTC program was made by the University administration. Its argument was that as a land grant college, Rutgers was legally obligated by the Morrill Act of 1862 to include those courses as part of its curriculum, and that the courses taught in "military tactics" had to be granted credits. Those of us who wanted to see an end to the campus ROTC program found the administration's legal defense highly debatable, and its unwillingness to address our objections deeply troubling.

So, in late October, a fired-up Richard Najarian, then president of SDS, and Jim Fine, then vice president, approached me and said, "We have to do something." The "something" was the occupation of the Army ROTC headquarters on College Avenue. Despite being a champion of nonviolent civil disobedience, I had considerable reservations. The first was whether it would accomplish its purpose of kick-starting the process of ridding Rutgers of ROTC, or that committing a patently illegal and disruptive campus act would have the exact opposite effect, and turn student apathy into animosity at what would be perceived as a bunch of troublemakers engaging in blatant acts of incivility at a University that celebrated civil and educational dialogue. The second reservation was the real possibility that the occupation would provoke a counter-protest, turn violent, and prompt either campus, state, or federal police intervention, for which the occupiers would be blamed, as would be those who supported them.

Fresh on my mind was what just happened the week or so before at the March on Washington--a demonstration that began as a peaceful protest and devolved into a violent confrontation with federal marshals at the steps of the Pentagon. More than 100,000 demonstrators, including more than two hundred students from Rutgers, had attended a rally at the Lincoln Memorial to hear passionate anti-war speeches. Despite the strident rhetoric of a few of the speakers, such as Dave Dellinger, who called for active resistance to the war, the rally was quite civil and peaceful if a bit carnival like. However, it was followed by a second rally at the Pentagon where speeches were far more inflammatory and inciteful. SDS's Carl Davidson urged the tens of thousands of demonstrators to "transform America by any means necessary" and to "confront the warmakers." Among attendees were about thirty students from Rutgers--mostly members of SDS, including Richard Najarian, Jim Fine, Stu Berman, Roger Cross, and Rusty Lyons. They had apparently separated from the larger group of two hundred Rutgers students who had come to peacefully march.

SI: Do you remember what they did, the ones that splintered off?

RB: Yes. They had joined a National Liberation Front contingent at the Lincoln Memorial that marched behind a tripod of Vietcong flags to the Pentagon. Members of the contingent had also armed the SDS group with long cardboard cylinders enclosing long wooden poles that they were told were only to be used defensively. However, soon after arriving at the Pentagon, many of them broke away from the rally being held on a lawn across from it, and rushed up its steps to confront the "warmakers." They were met by well-armed federal marshals. Heads were bashed and arrests made. SDS graduate student Roger Cross and possibly a few others from Rutgers were arrested. I had only attended the Lincoln Memorial rally. My takeaway was that what transpired at the steps of the Pentagon undermined what we were trying to accomplish with Vietnam Summer and that it soiled the image of the anti-war movement. [Editor's Note: The March on the Pentagon, a massive demonstration against the Vietnam War on October 21, 1967, began with a rally at the Lincoln Memorial organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.]

So, when Rutgers SDS leaders Najarian and Fine, fresh with bottled-up rage from the encounter at the steps of the Pentagon, proposed that "we" confront the "warmakers" by occupying Army ROTC headquarters at Rutgers, I worried that it too would devolve in violence and greatly set back the anti-war movement on campus. Both dismissed my reservations and were fully determined to go ahead with the occupation. However, because I had good relations with the handful of other campus anti-war groups, including the Young Democrats and the Committee of Conscience, as well as many of the anti-war faculty members, they believed I was the only person associated with SDS who could mobilize campus support for the occupation that would be critical to its success. So, we negotiated. I agreed to support, though not participate, in the occupation, and to mobilize campus support on its behalf. However, I insisted that there be no "defensive weapons," nor physical resistance to attempts to impede entry in the building by ROTC personnel, members of the dean's office, or to arrests by the campus patrol or the New Brunswick police if it came to that. They gave their word of promise. In return, to keep counter-protestors at bay--a big concern--and to prevent any incidents arising from attempts by ROTC staff, instructors, or students to breach the human barricade, I offered to do my best to work closely with Campus Patrol Chief Robert Ochs and Dean of Men Howard Crosby.

Another concern I raised was about goals. I believed there had to be a set of agreed-upon goals for the occupation, and an endgame for the occupation with something positive to show for it. We agreed that the goal had to be the elimination of ROTC and the occupation as way to build student and faculty support for its elimination. As to the "something positive" to show for the occupation that would hopefully end without arrests, for me it had to be a best-faith effort on the part of the administration to seriously investigate non-ROTC options for teaching "military tactics" on campus. Najarian and Fine were vague about what it would take for them to voluntarily end the occupation. My sense was that they seemed more interested in sending a message to the "warmakers" in Washington with whom they had just gone to battle on the steps of the Pentagon than in sending a message to the University administration with whom they would eventually need to negotiate if there was any hope of ridding Rutgers of ROTC. I worried but gave my support and hoped for the best.

So, in the early hours of the morning of November 6, long before dawn, a core group of us met at my apartment at 67 Louis Street to review final logistics, including such practical matters as how to feed and keep warm the expected thirty to fifty all-day and all-night participants. At six AM, the occupation of the front porch of Army ROTC headquarters at 157 College Avenue began. The first day was peaceful. ROTC officers, students, campus patrolmen and several deans requested entry into the building, but were politely turned away. They thankfully complied without incident. A few hundred anti-occupation demonstrators organized by Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and Young Americans for Freedom showed up in the early afternoon, but despite flaring tempers, they remained surprisingly peaceful. If any eggs were hurled at the occupiers--the traditional weapons of choice of pro-war fraternity brothers--I have no recollection of it. The dean's office, with its twenty-four/seven presence, played a critical role in keeping the peace, as did the campus patrol, ROTC officials and the thankfully calm, polite and restrained verbal and physical behavior of the occupants. Dean Crosby asked the occupants to leave and, just as politely, they declined.

I became concerned when, despite receiving a summons to appear before the University Judicial Board two days later, on Wednesday afternoon, the occupiers declared they would neither end the occupation nor attend the proceeding until ROTC was removed. The dean's office had intimated that if the occupants refused to attend the judicial board proceedings and were suspended but continued to blockade the building, they would consider calling in the New Brunswick Police to remove and arrest them for trespassing. That would not be a good endgame. I spent a good deal of the day gathering support among students and faculty, including working with my friend Peter Kuznick, who founded the Committee of Conscience, to help arrange for six-time Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas to show his support for the occupation.

SI: Okay. I interviewed Peter Kuznick, and he talked about this.

RB: Oh, absolutely. Yes, I remember. Norman Thomas was speaking at the gym, which is diagonally across from the ROTC building. Peter and I were very good friends, more than just political friends. I believe I was the one who encouraged him to major in history. I first encountered him at an SDS literature table at the student center on George Street--the old student center, when it was called the Ledge. I was a sophomore at the time. I think it was during freshman orientation week in September 1966. He was very politically astute, pro-civil rights and very anti-war--a budding revolutionary, I thought. I quizzed him on his major. He said, "Pre-med." "Well, why don't you skip the Che Guevara period?" I asked half-seriously and half in jest. Che Guevara was a medical doctor before he became a revolutionary. We soon became good friends--politically and personally--and still are, though he jokingly blames me because he became a history major instead of a dentist like his father and younger brother.

Thanks largely to Peter, who had been secretary to Thomas, the Student Council invited Thomas to speak at Rutgers. It so happened that the date of his speech on the war in Vietnam was the Monday evening of the first day of the occupation. Conveniently, he was giving the speech at the Rutgers Gym, a stone's throw away from the Army ROTC building. So, I asked Peter if he could arrange for Thomas to come by the Army ROTC building as a show of support for the occupation. Peter asked and Thomas enthusiastically agreed to make the visit, despite his frail condition. Thomas's visit, along with coverage of the occupation by WCBS, as well The New York Times, and, most importantly, the Targum, made it the number one news story on campus and helped draw attention to and swell support for the cause. [Editor's Note: On November 7, 1967, Norman Thomas, the six-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, spoke at the College Avenue Gymnasium about ending the war in Vietnam. Prior to the speech, he stopped by the demonstration at the ROTC headquarters at 157 College Avenue to show solidarity with the protesters.]

As planned, the occupation continued throughout the night with the sit-in swelling to fifty students. The first night and next day were also free of violence, despite rumored egg and water attacks by ROTC cadets and fraternity brothers. A few cherry bombs went off and some of the counter-protestors got verbally more aggressive. However, the dean's office kept the peace. In the meantime, with the help of my contacts at SANE and Women Strike for Peace, and by clearing out my kitchen pantry, I helped ensure that the overnighters at the ROTC building were furnished with blankets, sleeping bags, food, and lots of coffee. It was November and it was cold!

I also continued to urge restraint and calmness on the part of the occupants and to do my best to head off any incidents that either risked violence or cast the occupants in a negative light. Such a potential incident arose first thing on Tuesday morning, when Major Muhlenfeld of Army ROTC requested permission to enter the building to retrieve instructional material he needed for a presentation he was scheduled to give at a nearby high school. I encouraged Najarian and Fine to make an exception and allow him in the building for that purpose only. Thankfully, they agreed. They also began to recognize that the occupation could not go on forever and there had to be a willingness to settle for something short of the immediate removal of ROTC from campus. Towards that end, that Tuesday I met with a handful of faculty members about exerting pressure on the administration to establish a faculty committee to investigate alternatives to ROTC for teaching military tactics on campus. They were very receptive and agreed to draft a letter to that effect. I had also met with the campus Young Democrats who were supportive of the occupation and disposed to approving two resolutions in support of the goals of the occupation--one being that the University administration had the legal authority to eliminate the ROTC program and still comply with the Morrill Act, and the second supporting the establishment of a Military Science Department in place of ROTC. Also, Reverend Abernethy, the University chaplain and an anti-war supporter, let it be known that he'd be willing to host a neutral meeting to help resolve the occupation peacefully and without arrests. I welcomed the offer as did Dean Crosby, who also seemed willing to establish a subcommittee of the University's Military Policy Committee to investigate alternative ways to fulfill the obligations of the Morrill Act. That was a real breakthrough as far as I was concerned. [Editor's Note: Bradford S. Abernethy served as the University chaplain at Rutgers (and later a program associate for Rutgers International Center) from 1945 to 1974.]

With favorable responses from faculty members, receptive ones from the dean's office, and a 1934 Supreme Court decision that came to my attention that appeared to give further legal authority to the University to fulfill its obligations under the Morrill Act without having to host and administer the ROTC program, I met with Najarian and Fine. I urged them to attend a meeting that Tuesday evening at the home of Reverend Abernethy and to formally request at that meeting that the University administration reconsider its position that it had no legal authority to end the campus ROTC program, and that in exchange for its "good faith" willingness to do so, they be willing to agree to end the occupation and attend the Judicial Board hearing the following afternoon. To my great relief, Najarian and Fine agreed to do both.

SI: I saw, also, that the Judicial Board took action against people who were part of the ROTC demonstration. Do you recall that?

RB: Yes, at the Wednesday Judicial Board hearing, twenty-seven of the ROTC building occupants were found guilty of disrupting University operations and placed on disciplinary probation. I believe the next day, Dean Grobman declined to suspend them. Instead, they were required to attend a handful of classes on "The Rules of Rebellion, Reason and Responsibility in the University," which they agreed to do.

Disappointingly, the same day of the hearing, Dean Crosby issued a statement reiterating the University's position that it was legally obligated under the Morrill Act to continue the campus ROTC program. However, the statement also disclosed that a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on ROTC policy had been asked to consider legal alternatives to fulfill its obligations as a land-grant college. So, in the end, Crosby honored his agreement.

Also, on that same day, twenty-four faculty members, including history department professors Sam Baily, Lloyd Gardner, Traian Stoianovich, Warren Susman and Donald Weinstein, signed a petition urging the University administration to, among other things, place the subject of ROTC and related issues raised by the student occupation on the agenda of the relevant faculty committee. The administration responded favorably to the petition and an Ad Hoc Committee on Military Education was formed to make recommendations on the future of ROTC. Hearings were held and several students were invited to present their views. Peter Kuznick remembers that I was one of the students interviewed, but I have no recollection of it. Five months later, the Ad Hoc Committee, composed mostly of faculty members, recommended a series of changes to the ROTC program designed to raise it to the academic standards of other University departments, institute greater faculty oversight, and eliminate some of its more disturbing aspects, including credits for military drill exercises and high-pressure freshman recruitment practices. Unfortunately, it voted in favor of the program's retention, as well as the continuance of the development and teaching of courses in military strategy, tactics, organization, and weaponry by ROTC military personnel and all with credits. A month later, despite twenty-six dissents by those who favored the entire elimination of the ROTC program, the newly-constituted Rutgers College faculty voted in favor of the committee's recommendations. The lengthy meeting at which that final vote was cast by the Rutgers College faculty ended with a resolution approved by acclamation that thanked the students who first brought the issue of ROTC to its attention. It was a welcomed if token nod to the occupiers.

Admittedly, I was far from pleased with the outcome of the vote. Putting aside my wish to see the ROTC program completely removed from campus, I felt that if it were to be retained, any aspects of it that even loosely constituted military training, including the teaching of the use of weaponry and the conducting of military drills, should have been prohibited. However, the reform changes were a step in the right direction--reforms that were in large measure inspired by a nonviolent and minimally disruptive act of civil disobedience that awakened students and faculty to the problematic aspects of the campus ROTC program. Still, I was disheartened to learn a little more than three months after the ROTC building blockade that more than 150 of Rutgers ROTC cadets, well-trained in the "arts of war," received orders to arm for combat.

In retrospect, there is a lingering question I ask myself: If there had been no Vietnam War, would the ROTC program have appeared on my political radar screen in 1967? In all candor, my answer is likely not. But there was a war--a senseless and murderous one where war crimes were a regular occurrence--and the ROTC program trained and supplied most of the junior military leaders to fight in it, and one of its centers of operations was hosted and administered by Rutgers University.

There was one more "extracurricular" political event during my undergraduate years at Rutgers that I was associated with. It occurred just a few months after the takeover of the Army ROTC building. Dow Chemical Company, most familiarly known as the manufacturer of Saran Wrap, was scheduled to appear on campus to interview and recruit graduating seniors at the Rutgers placement center at 50 College Avenue. Dow Chemical was also a producer of napalm, a highly toxic chemical gel that can cause maiming, asphyxiation, and death. Dow was the major supplier of napalm to the Department of Defense, and the toxic chemical was indiscriminately dropped throughout much of the Vietnamese countryside in Vietnam in thousands of fire-bombing missions that maimed civilians, destroyed whole villages and hamlets, and decimated subsistence crops. Grotesque images of the chemical's effects on Vietnamese villagers appeared regularly in major publications.

Understandably enraged by these images and encouraged by the positive outcome of the occupation of the ROTC building, the leadership of SDS wanted to erect a human blockade of the placement center to obstruct Dow Chemical in its recruitment efforts. As much as I was as enraged by the images of maimed, innocent villagers, and believed the indiscriminate spraying of napalm fire bombs constituted a war crime according to the provisions of the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal, I strongly opposed the blockade, believing there was a more effective and constructive way to draw attention to the issue and unite versus alienating the broader student body. I also had a sense that because the blockade would directly interfere with the ability of students to exercise their right to take advantage of a university-sponsored event, the administration would be much less patient, as would students and faculty, with such a blockade. The risk of arrests and violence could not be cavalierly dismissed.

So, what I proposed to SDS as an alternative was a public debate with Dow Chemical on the morality of manufacturing and selling napalm to the Department of Defense despite their fully knowing the consequences of its deployment. I also proposed a follow-up peaceful demonstration at the placement office during the two days Dow was scheduled to do its recruiting.

The proposal was a dud. By this time, SDS leadership at Rutgers had less and less patience for debate versus taking direct action. Unlike myself, who was willing to debate campus groups such as YAF (I debated YAF President Howard Cohen on numerous occasions on WRSU's "Round Midnight" program moderated by Noah Applebaum), SDS found debating futile and a waste of its time. So, having been rebuffed by SDS, I went to Peter Kuznick of the Rutgers-Douglass Committee of Conscience and Steve Kessel of Rutgers-Douglass SANE and proposed such a debate with Dow. Both embraced it, and together we met with Dean Crosby, who endorsed it and who was quite amenable to a protest demonstration at the placement center as long as it remained peaceful and didn't interfere with the recruitment process. Peter, Steve, and I agreed to participate in the debate, as did Dow Chemical's East Coast Public Relations Director. Dean Crosby requested the participation of Philip Shaak, the Associate Dean of Business Administration at the Newark campus. Reverend Abernethy, the Rutgers chaplain, once again happily offered to serve as moderator. It was also agreed that the debate would focus exclusively on the morality of deploying napalm in the Vietnam War, and not on the merits of the war. The agreed-upon title of the debate was "The Moral Responsibility of Industry." The location was again Scott Hall 135.

The debate at Scott Hall again filled every seat in the house. Thanks to Reverend Abernethy, the debate remained civil, though passionate. I was especially impassioned. My European relatives were exterminated in Nazi death camps by the lethal chemical Zyklon B. The manufacturer of Zyklon B was I.G. Farben, the largest chemical conglomerate in the world at the time. Its CEO was an early backer of Hitler. It designed, built, and operated the slave labor camp known as Auschwitz II, where the labor camp victims were worked to near death, and then dispensed to the gas chambers of Auschwitz I, where they were showered with Zyklon B supplied in abundance by I.G. Farben under a lucrative contract with the Nazi government.

By sheer coincidence, I was reminded of and haunted by those facts almost every weekend during the previous fall. I had taken a part-time, weekend night-time job as a watchman at a company named General Analine and Film (GAF) in Linden, New Jersey. It paid well, and except for having to make the rounds of a handful of rusted and aged warehouses with leaky roofs that stored containers of toxic chemicals, it left me a great deal of time to catch up on my course readings and written assignments. However, unbeknownst to me, but what I learned soon after taking the job, was that GAF had been a wholly-owned subsidiary of I.G. Farben until it was divested of ownership soon after we entered World War II. After discovering GAF's Nazi connections, I found myself haunted by images of Auschwitz I and II as I made the rounds of the complex of warehouses with those leaky roofs and containers of toxic chemicals. I also learned, in further studying up on I.G. Farben in preparation for the debate, that at the Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremburg Military Tribunal, a handful of I.G. Farben executives had been indicted and found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity for their culpability in the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons. I, as well as Peter, who was equally impassioned, referenced in our debate with Dow Chemical I.G. Farben, Zyklon B, and specifically the provisions of the Nuremburg Tribunal for which I.G executives were found guilty.

Dow's defense of supplying the government with napalm was that if a democratically-elected government believed napalm was necessary to fight a legally-authorized war, it had a moral obligation to provide it. Our response was that there was a higher moral code, as reflected in the Nuremburg provisions, and that whether a government was democratically elected or not was beside the point. After all, Hitler was popularly elected, at least initially, and throughout most of his reign, despite the de facto elimination of elections and suppression of all but the Nazi Party, he continued to enjoy majority, popular support. Dow Chemical Company had a choice. It could have followed a higher moral code and stopped supplying napalm to the government. However, it chose not to do so. Admittedly, what the democratically-elected U.S. government was perpetrating in Vietnam, even with the indiscriminate use of napalm, was not comparable to the war crimes committed by the Nazi government, but it was a war crime.

Based on the audience response and the great turnout of protestors at the placement office the next day, the decision to debate versus blockade Dow was a wise one. More than a hundred protestors showed up to welcome the Dow recruiters with such signs as "Dow Shall Not Kill." The coverage of the protest was also better than expected. The next day, the Newark Star-Ledger published a lengthy piece headlined, "Rutgers Students 'Quietly' Picket Dow Recruiters." When asked by the reporter if we were planning to blockade the entrance to the placement center, I said, pointing to the protestors who the previous evening had attended the debate, "When they saw what Dow had to say for itself, there was no need for further direct action." What prompted the reporter's probing question was that a handful of SDS activists that had showed up at the protest were urging protestors to block the entrance to the placement center. Fortunately, their wishes were ignored. Though the reporter mistakenly identified me as president of the Rutgers SDS chapter, I was only a member, and an increasingly tenuous one at that.

After the Dow event, I fully dissociated myself from SDS. I felt that its strident rhetoric and confrontational tactics were increasingly marginalizing it as a campus political organization, and it was undermining the reputation of the anti-war movement as a peaceful one both at Rutgers and nationally. I also tired of being a one-person force of restraint. Had Fine and Najarian not been good friends and had I not felt they were true champions of peace and justice, I would have severed my relationship with SDS a lot sooner. Still, when I finally parted company with SDS, I did so without publicly airing my growing disenchantment with an organization whose founding principles I had so much embraced and admired. My hope was that the organization would modulate its rhetoric and disposition toward self-destructive, direct action. I was rudely disappointed, as I was soon to discover.

In early May of 1968, when I picked up the Targum, two front-page articles grabbed my attention. The first one--above the fold--made me smile and cheer. The day or so before Simon and Garfunkel were scheduled to perform at the Rutgers Military Ball concert, they abruptly cancelled their appearance. They did so when learning that the concert was being sponsored by the Rutgers Air Force Society. Simon said he would rather face a lawsuit than lend his talents to support the military establishment. Instead, he and Garfunkel agreed to give a free concert at Princeton on behalf of SDS. The second article--just under the fold--made me frown and gulp. Headlined, "SDS occupies campus buildings," the piece chronicled "a series of lightning quick Columbia-type seizures," that had begun the previous evening, alluding to the SDS take over the previous month at Columbia University that had ended in bloody arrests by New York City Police.

The first was the takeover of Schanck Observatory at Old Queens on the grounds that top secret war research for the U.S. Army and Department of Defense was being conducted at the site, at least according to SDS co-president Fine. Clarifying the claim, the Targum reported, as previously acknowledged, that no human beings had set foot in the building in years. [Editor's Note: The Daniel S. Schanck Observatory is an astronomical observatory on the Old Queens Campus of Rutgers-New Brunswick. Members of SDS took over Schanck Observatory beginning on May 2, 1968.]

The second building was Grayson's Tie Store on George Street, where SDS co-president Najarian spent the night "lodged between the door of the establishment and a large rack of $1.98 silk ties," according to Targum. The occupation of Grayson's Tie Store was in protest of what was believed to be the University complicity in a proposed urban renewal project in downtown New Brunswick that would replace the living quarters of several hundred low-income families with commercial establishments and parking lots. Apparently, William Weisberg, an assistant to President Gross and chairman of the Middlesex County Economic Opportunity Board, who was accused of having a hand in the renewal project, purchased his bow ties Grayson's. Occupying a tie store as a protest of one its patrons struck me as convoluted.

The third direct action was even more so. Several Macke vending machines across the campus were seized. The rationale for such a petty act of vandalism was that many of the items placed in the machines, including caramel nuggets, were made by the Welch Candy Company whose family owners had founded the far-right wing John Birch Society. What truly perplexed me was that Steve Kessel, a founding member of the local chapter of the Rutgers-Douglass chapter of SANE, an articulate and impressive participant in the Dow debate, as well as a strong supporter of the peaceful protest at the placement center that followed it, honchoed the seizure of the vending machines, and defended the action on such bizarre grounds. [Editor's Note: The John Birch Society is a conservative political organization that was established in 1958 by Robert W. Welch, Jr.]

However, as much as I found the three events ineffectual, self-destructive to their cause, and outright embarrassing, they were a product of the times. The assassination of Dr. King, the supreme champion of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience, had unleashed an enormous amount of pent-up anger and rage that was not easy to channel constructively in the way Dr. King was so masterfully able to do. In the immediate aftermath of Dr. King's assassination, patience and, at times, clear thinking took an extended sabbatical. Thoughtful and well-meaning people fighting for good causes did dumb things like taking over a long-abandoned observatory, occupying a store that sold bow ties, and hijacking dormitory vending machines. However, compared to the murder of Dr. King and the millions of innocent civilians maimed and killed in Vietnam, as well as the thousands of our young men shipped home in body bags all because of a senseless and immoral war, those disruptive and nonviolent displays of civil disobedience in New Brunswick that began on that spring evening that Simon and Garfunkel made a no-show appearance at the Rutgers Gym were small potatoes. [Editor's Note: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.]

Two days later, on May 4th, I received a Western Union Telegram from Mark Rudd. Rudd was the head of the SDS chapter at Columbia University at the time. He was also the most prominent leader of the takeover of a handful of campus buildings, including the Low Library that housed the office of the university's president, Grayson Kirk. The issues that sparked the occupation were pretty much the same ones that triggered those at Rutgers--government-funded university research, renewal projects that negatively impacted poor Black neighboring communities, and the atrocities associated with the Vietnam War. During the days and nights of the occupation, SDS temporarily took several university administrators hostage--an occupation that came to an end when, at the request of the administration, the NYPD stormed the buildings on April 30th to evict the occupants--a brutal and violent operation that left more than a hundred injuries and seven hundred arrests. In the telegram, Rudd urged me to "CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY COLUMBIAS" and offered his help to do so by sending speakers, setting up rallies, and promoting "ACTION STRIKES." I certainly was not the only one to receive such a telegram. However, even though it was personally addressed to me, I elected to ignore what I believed to be a misguided call for more occupations like those that had just taken place at Rutgers.

I should note that during that tumultuous 1967-'68 period of my junior year, I was not opposed to civil disobedience. There was a long and venerable tradition that went back to the Sons of Liberty, who resisted British colonial rule, the Abolitionists, who challenged the inhumanity of slavery, and the SNCC and SDS Freedom Fighters, who went into the deep South during the Civil Rights Movement and fought for the right of Black citizens to vote and sit as equals on buses and at lunch counters. My only insistence at the time for supporting a specific act of civil disobedience was that it be effective and nonviolent. Of course, there was no way to predict or guarantee such an outcome, especially if the act was fueled by frustration and rage.

As the 1968 Democratic primaries were well along and the presidential and congressional elections just six months away, I began to consider who I would support and what role if any I would play. In the summer of '66, as mentioned, I was actively involved in campaigning for peace candidates Frost and Jefferson. My off-campus involvement in the Vietnam Summer program during the summer of 1967 was, as I saw it, largely an extension of the Frost campaign with the goal of laying the groundwork for peace candidates, especially a candidate for president fully committed to ending the war, redirecting resources back home to address the neglect of urban America, and who also had what it would take to build a broad enough coalition of supporters--Black and white, middle and working class, rich and poor--to win the 1968 presidential election. With LBJ out of the picture after his decision not to run following the Tet Offensive, only two candidates worth their salt appeared on my radar screen--Gene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. Most of my activist comrades were in the McCarthy camp. They all thought Kennedy was an opportunist and untrustworthy. I less so. I was impressed with the speech he gave in March when he announced his candidacy, and even more impressed by the improvised one he gave in Indianapolis to a mostly Black audience on the evening of the day that Dr. King was gunned down. The empathy, compassion, and hopefulness he exuded before the pained and hopeless Black community, and plea for peace in the name and honor of its fallen champion of nonviolent protest, civil rights, and full economic equality, was extraordinarily courageous, moving, and I believed authentic and heartfelt. His off-the-cuff speech certainly moved me. I also believed that he would be able to bridge the divide between poor Blacks and white working-class American and draw their support--at least far more than McCarthy, who struck me as a bit too aloof and professorial to build the coalition necessary to defeat Nixon. Kennedy's substantial margin of victory in Indiana in early May seemed to reflect his ability to draw support from a broad and diverse enough electorate to win the 1968 presidential election.

So, as the semester came to end, I stopped by the Kennedy for President campaign office on Railroad Plaza in downtown New Brunswick--the same location where I had campaigned for David Frost in '66. The New Jersey primaries were just a few weeks away. I took some campaign literature, and when I visited my parents, who were now living in Verona, I encouraged them, their friends, and our relatives to vote for Kennedy. Kennedy ended up losing the New Jersey primary on June 4. However, he won decisively in Nebraska and the crucial state of California and, with those two victories, seemed on a trajectory to win the Democratic nomination--until, like Dr. King, he was gunned down by another hateful and violent fanatic. [Editor's Note: The Nebraska Democratic primary took place on May 14, 1968, with Robert Kennedy securing 51.4 percent of the vote to Eugene McCarthy's 31 percent. The New Jersey, California and South Dakota primary elections took place on June 4. McCarthy narrowly beat Kennedy in New Jersey, but Kennedy won South Dakota and California. After delivering his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, Kennedy was shot three times by Sirhan Sirhan and died the next day. Vice President Hubert Humphrey went on to win the Democratic nomination but lost in the general election to Republican Richard Nixon.]

Demoralized by the descent of SDS, sickened and numbed by the assassinations of Dr. King and Senator Kennedy, and appalled by the likelihood that Hubert Humphrey would win the Democratic nomination, I spent first half of the summer communing with nature, working for a residential landscaping company mowing lawns, weeding bed gardens, and pruning shrubs. It was quite therapeutic. I also turned down invitations to attend the Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of August. I had a good excuse. To the surprise of most of my free-spirited, counter-cultural, and political activist friends, I tied the knot, marrying Dori Seider, a brilliant student at Douglass who like me was about to enter her senior year.

I first met Dori in the early spring of 1967. It was a Saturday night, and of all places, at the Government Documents section of the Alexander Library, where I had a part-time job retrieving and reshelving materials for students and faculty. Dori was my first and only customer that evening. Since she was quite attractive, I was puzzled by what she was doing on a Saturday night at the library, and especially the Government Documents section, which contained driest and smallest of print materials anywhere on library's six floors of stacks. I was soon unpuzzled and delightfully so when she said, "I've been assigned a paper on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and I'm not sure where to begin." Passed by a near unanimous bipartisan vote in August 1964, the congressional resolution gave President Johnson unlimited authority to wage the Vietnam War. "Begin with the Congressional Record," I suggested and happily retrieved it, directing her to the appropriate session and pages where the resolution was debated. She thanked me, and as I was about to return to the task of shelving stacks of documents in their proper place, I said, "You really need to read Senator Wayne Morse's blistering speech in protest of the resolution." The Oregon senator was one of two senators who voted against the resolution. "Where?" she asked. I thumbed to his speech. She thanked me, buried her head in the fine print, and that was it. I was too professional and shy to even ask her out for coffee, so it wasn't until a few weeks later when she approached me at an SDS literature table at the Douglass Student Center, where a few of us were trying to drum up support for the April anti-war demonstration in New York. And the rest is history.

Our spring and summer romance was interrupted for the two semesters of our junior year as she had already been accepted into the junior-year abroad program, which she would be spending in France. Absence apparently made our hearts grow fonder, so on her return, we agreed to share an apartment on the edge of the Douglass campus our senior year--a fairly common practice after the 1967 "summer of love." However, her father, a man of conservative temperament who worked for the Department of Defense supplying troops with uniforms and other protective gear, so strongly believed in the eleventh commandment of "Thou Shall Not Have Sex Before Marriage" that he swore to disown Dori if we lived together. So, mischievously and in jest, I suggested we call his bluff and marry. Unfortunately, Dori took me seriously and told her father of my proposal, and to my shocking and terrifying surprise, he blessed it. He apparently was fond of me and hoped that marriage would de-radicalize me. Since we really wanted to live together, it didn't seem a big deal to me to sign a few legal documents to make it happen. It wasn't as if it had such earth-shattering ramifications as voting for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. So, Dori's father bankrolled the wedding, thanks to his employment at the Department of Defense!

More than hundred guests attended. A handful of my political activist friends were among them, including Fine and Najarian, with whom I remained friends and who, to my delight, chose to attend the wedding rather than the Democratic Convention. I recall having long conversations with them about the pitched battles taking place in Chicago, as well as about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which had taken place the week before. Surprisingly, we agreed on the futility of the Chicago protest and concurred in our opposition to the military repression of Prague Spring. It was a joyful evening and I was grateful that our friendships had survived our political disagreements of the previous spring.

In my senior year, I settled into the tranquility of married life and immersed myself more fully in the study of history--I say more fully because, despite my involvement in campus politics, by my junior year, I had become a very dedicated and serious student of history and, more broadly, philosophy and psychology. Though I attribute my passion for history to my brother's inspiring example, or should I say coaxing, and to the exposure to the "great books" of the past that lined his home library shelves, that passion was greatly magnified by the many professors with whom I studied. There were many to whom I am indebted and deserve mention.

My freshman philosophy instructor Professor Robert Zimmerman taught me to question all philosophical systems, postulates, and truths, and bequeathed to me a healthy skepticism that helped me--not always successfully--to reign in my youthful hunger for self-satisfying and comforting philosophies and ideologies that explained everything and nothing.

My freshman English instructor Alicia Ostriker, despite making me suffer through the Dubliners, gave an appreciation for great literature and taught me to read between the lines of a novel to fully understand it. [Editor's Note: Alicia Ostriker is a Professor Emerita of English at Rutgers, where she taught from 1965 to 2004.]

My political science professor Gordon Schochet exposed me to the great political thinkers in history. His inspiring and insightful lectures nearly convinced me to become a political science major. [Editor's Note: Gordon Schochet is a Professor Emeritus of political science at Rutgers. He taught from 1965 to 2009.]

And then there were the handful of history professors from whom I had the great privilege of taking numerous lecture courses and seminars.

There was Professor McCormick, whose great storytelling of early American history seduced me into becoming a history major, and whose lecture on the organizational savvy of the Sons of the Liberty was great cause for humbling reflection as I helped to build an on and off campus anti-war movement.

There was Professor Harold Poor, whose lecture course on modern German history gave me a great appreciation of how a great nation that had blessed the world with the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Heine, Goethe, Einstein and my very own Rabbi Prinz had also cursed it with the likes of Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann. Professor Poor's seminar on the history of German philosophy and psychology that exposed me to such great thinkers as Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown was intellectually intoxicating. His mind was as sharp and incisive as that of any intellectual and scholar that I have ever encountered. We had wonderful if fraught debates over whether Marcuse or Brown had the more penetrating critique of Freud, who had better insights into the psychological sources of human aggression and domination, and who came up with more compelling ways to nourish the life instinct of Eros in the face of the existential threat to civilization posed by the death instinct of Thanatos. In retrospect, Professor Poor was right that Brown had the richer, deeper, and more penetrating insights and answers. It was a tragedy that he died at such a young age. There were some historians who thought Professor Poor was an intellectual lightweight. I thought just the opposite. [Editor's Note: Harold L. Poor served as a history professor at Rutgers College from 1966 until 1991, when he retired due to health complications from AIDS. He died on January 24, 1992. Poor authored the biography of German writer Kurt Tucholsky, Kurt Tucholsky and the Ordeal of Germany 1914-1935, in 1968.]

Professor Herbert Rowen, an acclaimed scholar of early modern European history, gave a seminar on “Utopia and Utopian Thought,” which exposed me to all the great utopian thinkers, from the prophets Amos and Isaiah to Plato, Thomas More to Saint-Simon and Fourier, Proudhon to Marcuse. A conservative and an unrelenting skeptic, he questioned the naiveté of many of those thinkers and challenged me to do the same. I recall Professor Rowen reminding us that the word utopia derived from the Greek words for "nowhere" and that utopias were visions to help improve the real everyday world we lived in and not an alternative to it. Like Professor Zimmerman, he prescribed a healthy dose of skepticism when it came to utopian ideas, many of which, as he emphasized, were often infused with ideological preconceptions. We had our heated debates, but underlying them was a mutual respect. [Editor's Note: Herbert H. Rowen was a professor of history at Rutgers from 1964 to 1987. He specialized in early modern European history, particularly Dutch history.]

Professor Tilden Edelstein's seminar on the post-Civil War Reconstruction era was more than enlightening. He was a great scholar and teacher, and learning about the hopes and tragedies of what later came to be called the "great experiment of the second founding" was eye-opening. He gave me an appreciation, just like Professor Poor, that progress rarely moves in an upwardly straight line. [Editor's Note: Tilden G. Edelstein served as a history professor and University administrator at Rutgers from 1967 until 1989, when he left for the State University of New York, Stony Brook.]

There were Professor Lloyd Gardner and Warren Susman. Words can hardly express the enormous influence and impact both had on me and to whom I am forever indebted. Lloyd's breadth and depth of knowledge and understanding of American foreign policy, as well as the origins of our misguided venture in Southeast Asia, was unparalleled. My views of the problematic nature of the Vietnam War were heavily shaped and immensely sharpened by his knowledge, insights, and perspectives. I was greatly humbled when asked in the fall of '67 to speak on the Vietnam War on the same stage as an esteemed scholar of American foreign policy, as well as being on the stage with that giant of an intellect Warren Susman. Warren was one of a kind. His breath of knowledge was staggering, his ability to impart it in spellbinding lectures that were both impassioned and intellectually provocative was without parallel. When he passed away in the mid-'80s, I recall Lloyd saying that when Warren was "on," there was no better lecturer at any university in the country. That was certainly my experience. He was also the most accessible professor I had at Rutgers.

SI: During that period, were you looking at graduate school options or thinking about becoming a scholar in history?

RB: Yes. I went to the University of Rochester on a four-year National Defense Education Fellowship. What an irony! Only in America was it possible that someone who had fought to remove Army ROTC from one university would be granted a four-year free ride to attend another one! [laughter] I should have turned down the grant on principal, but it was hard to turn down the opportunity to study at another great department of history.

In retrospect, maybe I should have turned it down. I had intended to study with two renowned historians. One was Loren Baritz, an intellectual history professor who had written City on a Hill and Servants of Power, two books I devoured over the summer. The second was Akira Iriye, a renowned diplomatic historian that Lloyd had recommended. To my dismay, when I arrived on campus in the fall of '69, I learned that both Baritz and Iriye had taken positions at other universities. However, it could have been a lot worse but for the fact the history department had just hired the now-acclaimed historian Eugene Genovese as chairman of the department. So, for my first and what would be my only year at Rochester, I studied with Genovese. Genovese was an intriguing and perplexing character. Though a Marxist historian, at least at the time, he regularly sported three-piece Brooks Brothers suits. When he wasn't puffing on cigars, he was speaking in a heavy Brooklynese accent. He was one of kind. In his parlance, he was a bundle of "dialectical contradictions." He was a tough but great mentor. I wrote a major seminar paper for him on free Blacks in the antebellum South, which he meticulously annotated with very helpful comments that clearly reflected that he was as dedicated to his students as to his scholarship. I also studied with the labor historian Herb Gutman, also a wonderful mentor and scholar. [Editor's Note: After leaving Rutgers in 1967, Eugene Genovese taught at Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Canada. In 1969, he joined the History Department of the University of Rochester, where he remained until 1986. Herbert Gutman, who specialized in slavery and labor history, taught at the University of Rochester from 1966 to 1972.]

At the time, my wife Dori had received a master's degree in education at the University of Rochester, and wanted desperately to return to New Jersey to be near her family. So, after receiving my master's degree, I turned in my NDEA fellowship and returned to Rutgers to study with Warren and Lloyd. Ironically, just when the decision was made to return to Rutgers, the University of Rochester had hired Christopher Lasch, the intellectual historian, whose writings, including his book the New Radicalism in America, I greatly admired and would have loved to study under. [Editor's Note: Christopher Lasch was a professor of history at the University of Rochester from 1970 to 1994. Lasch's The New Radicalism in America was published in 1965.]

So, I went back to Rutgers to study with Lloyd and Warren, but after years of teaching at Rutgers and several community colleges, as well as working on my doctoral thesis, I decided to take leave of academia. I'm not sure what led to the decision, but my financial situation was a factor. I was just getting by as a lecturer at Rutgers. I remember exactly when I finally made the decision. I blew out a tire on the New Jersey Turnpike on my way home from teaching an evening course at Rutgers and basically totaled the car. The towing costs alone broke my bank account. I also still had quite a way to go on my thesis and was tired of living hand to mouth. It was the beginning of the 1980s and the academic job market at the time was about as dismal as it had ever been, and I was in my early thirties. So, I scoured the want ads in The New York Times and, to my surprise, was in no time offered a position to head up a division of a technology research and publishing company in Connecticut. Despite the job paying ten times what I was making as a lecturer at Rutgers, I resisted accepting the position for weeks on end. I honestly did not want to take the job. I had very mixed feelings about leaving academia and did not want to disappoint Warren and Lloyd. Another part of me truly did not believe I could make the transition into a non-academic job. To overcome my doubts, Lou, the president of the research and publishing company, introduced me to the head of the chemicals research division. His name was Peter. He said, "Peter, tell Robert what you did before you headed up our chemical research division." He said, "I was a professor of philosophy."

So, I accepted the offer and stumbled into a new career. Within a few years, I had authored five limited edition books on future trends in electronic banking and the payments systems, and quickly became a highly-respected expert in the industry being regularly quoted in trade journals. If the private sector gave promotions as they did in the academic world, I would have been made a full professor by the end of my second year. After a few years, I was hired away by one of the company's clients, and later by another, until I tired of the corporate world. In the late 1980s, I found a futurist-oriented strategic advisory consulting firm. In less than a decade, I had morphed from being a teacher of the past to a prognosticator of the future. Without doubt, the research and critical-thinking skills I honed at Rutgers under the tutelage of Warren Susman, Lloyd Gardner, Harold Poor, Herbert Rowen, and Tilden Edelstein were invaluable in my short but quite productive, twenty-year career in the private sector, and to all of them I owe immense gratitude. I certainly have my regrets about leaving the academy, but not about having been associated with it for so many intellectually rewarding years.

My career in the semi-private sector ended for several reasons. The first had to do with 9/11. On that dark day, I was on the way from Connecticut to a nine AM client meeting at the World Financial Center, a building connected by a skywalk to the World Trade Center North Tower. I was running late, due to a brief meeting I had with one of my contract employees to address an issue that had come up with another client. On my way to the 42nd Street cross-town subway, a voice mail alert appeared on my cellphone. It was from my mother in Florida. The voice mail was garbled and virtually unintelligible, bordering on hysteria. I assumed my father was having another heart attack. I immediately returned the call. She asked where I was. When I told her I was in Grand Central Station about to get on the subway to the World Financial Center, she became even more hysterical. When she finally calmed down to tell me what she had just witnessed on live television, it didn't fully register. I called my client's office, but wasn't able to get through. I then sheepishly approached a police officer in Grand Central Station and asked if anything unusual had happened at the World Trade Center. "Oh yeah, big time," he replied, informing me that two planes had just crashed into the towers. It still didn't register, so I explained that I had a meeting at the nearby World Financial Center and asked if it was safe to attend it. He rolled his eyes, then asked where I lived. I said, "Connecticut." He peered up at the Metro New Haven train schedule board in the main waiting center and said quite forcefully, "Last train out of Grand Central to New Haven is at ten. You'd better get the hell on it, because otherwise, you're going to be stuck here for days."

So, I followed his advice and got on the very last train out of New York to Connecticut. A half-hour after the train left Grand Central, a middle-age female passenger, whom I call the "Blackberry Lady," let out a terrifying howl and then, at the top of her lungs, announced in a shrieking voice that one of the Twin Towers had collapsed. All the passengers in the cabin were in complete disbelief, all thinking she was overreacting and bordering on the delusional. However, because our cell phones were unable to connect to the internet, let alone make a live call, we had no way of disproving her wild claims. Then, almost an hour later, as we crossed into Connecticut, she let out another terrifying howl and again at the top of her lungs announced in an even more horrifying shriek that the other tower had collapsed. By then, we had already verified her original claim and the second one soon after. Still, we were all in disbelief, at least emotionally. It so happened she alone had a Blackberry, and for some apparent reason that now technological relic of the past had worked almost uninterruptedly during those 102 minutes from the time the North Tower was attacked until the South Tower collapsed. That was 9/11, and it had a profound, jolting effect on me. [Editor's Note: On September 11, 2001, terrorists crashed the first two of four hijacked jetliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The North Tower was struck at 8:46 AM and collapsed at 10:28 AM. The South Tower was struck at 9:03 AM and collapsed at 9:59 AM.]

In the days and weeks following that horrific and tragic day, I considered shutting down my company and retreating into retirement. I had been flying several times a month across the country for two decades to meet with clients and staying nights on end in hotels. I felt it was time to make another big change--to have more time to reflect, to write, to landscape, and to do more volunteer community service work. Fortunately, I was secure enough financially to do so. My decision to finally retire came a few years later, when I had to take on the time consuming and emotionally-taxing responsibility of caring for my parents, both of whom were in declining health. I was the only remaining child, since my brother had died of AIDS in 1992. So, I moved them from Florida to Connecticut, and dutifully cared for them for twelve very challenging but emotionally rewarding years. My father passed away in 2012 at the age of ninety-four, and my mother two years later at the age of ninety-three. Do you have other questions?

SI: Yes, I want to jump back to a few issues. You mentioned in passing the environmental movement. Since you said on your survey that you were involved in that, or at least interested in it, how did that come about?

RB: I think the genesis of my thoughts on the environment go back to the '60s and '70s. I'd have to say it began with my reading of two books during my high school years--books conveniently available in my brother's home library and that among so many others he prodded me to read. The first was Rachel Carson's 1962 Silent Spring, about the devastating effects of pesticides on our environment and our arrogant obsession with the need to dominate nature. The second was Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. One of my lasting takeaways of reading that Modern Library classic was his critique of "conspicuous consumption," the status-driven need to acquire evermore goods and services. Veblen did not speak to its impact on the environment. However, living in North Jersey, home to perhaps the greatest concentration of dump sites on the planet, made the connection between status-driven discretionary consumption and environmental degradation very palpable. In college, my reading of Norman O. Brown's Life against Death provided an intellectual framework for understanding the psychologic sources and devastating consequences of our compulsive need to dominate and ravage nature, though he too only peripherally addressed its environmental impact. Certainly, passing on a regular basis the plethora of oil refineries on the New Jersey Turnpike spewing the skies with odious toxins had its effect.

I was only marginally involved in the environmental movement of the 1970s. I did attend many of the annual Earth Day events, but that was pretty much it. Interestingly, my unfinished doctoral thesis addressed the environmental crisis in an oblique way. The working title was: The Significance of the First Great Depression in History:1873-1896. It was a paradoxical depression, one that saw wrenching economic dislocations, massive unemployment, widespread labor unrest and bankruptcies, and unprecedented cycles of booms and busts. At the same time, it was a twenty-three-year period that experienced unprecedented innovations and rates of productivity. Marx, who died in the middle of that First Great Depression, believed that it was the final crisis of capitalism and that the historically progressive role played by the captains of industry in advancing the productive forces of society had reached its limits and necessitated a revolution to fully unleash the productive forces and distribute it more equitably. Marx could not have been more mistaken. The scientific-technological revolution (the application of science and technology to industry) and the phenomena of what the economist Simon Kuznets termed "modern economic growth" that followed in the wake of the First Great Depression produced the most unprecedented improvement in living standards in modern history, notwithstanding the staggering increases in income and wealthy inequality that accompanied it. However, influenced by the writings of the economist and systems theorist Kenneth Boulding in his 1966 essay "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth," which raised alarming concerns about the impact of what he called the "cowboy economy" of capitalism with its never-ending search for new frontiers of growth on our ecological system and biosphere, and by Barry Commoner's 1971 The Closing Circle, as well as by other influential thinkers of the early environmental movement, it became clear to me that, although the 20th century scientific-technological revolution and phenomena of modern economic growth that followed in the aftermath of the First Great Depression was wildly productive based on its own accounting metrics of Gross National Product (GNP), it was hardly the case based on the accounting metrics of nature and the laws of physics. Despite all the advances in living standards and health care that the scientific-technological revolution made possible, the consequences for our environment and bio-life in general had been devastating. So, my thesis morphed into a critique of the claims of the mid-twentieth century celebrants of the scientific-technological revolution and modern economic growth based largely on the environmental degradation that accompanied them. Unfortunately, the accounting metrics of the sources of the climate crisis were not yet in place at the time. I wish they had. It would have helped to support my critique, as we now know that the 20th century scientific-technological revolution and the phenomena of modern economic growth that truly began to take off in the aftermath of the First Great Depression of 1873-'96 occurred in tandem with a steep increase in the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and atmospheric concentrations that greatly accelerated in the aftermath of the Second World War, and continues to this day to rise to potentially catastrophic levels for all human and biological life, despite all well-meaning efforts to reverse it.

I delivered a short paper on the environmental consequences of the scientific-technological revolution and modern economic growth at the 1981 Organization of American Historians (OAH) conference in Detroit. Warren, who was a member of the OAH program committee that year, asked me to propose a session on the topic, which I offered to do. I believe the session was entitled "The Significance of the Scientific Technological Revolution in History," though I could be wrong. I invited two well-known professors to critique it. One was Kenneth Boulding. He was also an early opponent of the Vietnam War, though a vehement critic of the excesses of the anti-war movement. The other was David Noble, a historian who I had befriended at Rochester when we were both graduated students. David had published America by Design, a study of the way the captains of industry in the late 19th and early 20th century shaped science and technology to serve the profit-driven needs of emerging corporate capitalism. [Editor's Note: Kenneth E. Boulding was an economist and peace activist who was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1967 until his retirement in 1980. David Franklin Noble was a historian of technology who taught at several universities, including MIT, Drexel University and York University. His book, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism, was published in 1977.]

SI: Yes, the name is familiar.

RB: I had enormous respect for David as a historian and critic of corporate capitalism. However, he spoke his mind and at times to his detriment. I spoke first at the session, then Boulding followed. Though I was somewhat critical of Boulding's 1964 book The Meaning of the 20th Century, an extended essay that celebrate the scientific-technological revolution and modern economic growth, I balanced it with praise, especially for his recognition of the ecological limits of the "cowboy economy." My critique was relatively civil, polite, and within the normal bounds of discourse for a scholarly conference. David, on the other hand, unleashed a fusillade of attacks on Boulding and the unified social sciences movement that was unfair, quite disrespectful, and devoid of a trace of nuance, especially given that Boulding was among the most creative intellectuals of his generation and shared an abiding concern about the environmental crisis, the threat of nuclear war, and worldwide poverty. He also had devoted a great deal of time and thought to coming up with pragmatic solutions to address those concerns. Which was precisely the reason I invited him to participate and was greatly humbled by his willingness to do so on a pro bono basis. Despite being a Quaker and of peaceful temperament, Boulding fired back, and the escalating and evermore rancorous exchanges devolved into a verbal, mud-wrestling fight. It was a complete embarrassment, and as the one who had organized it and invited both Noble and Boulding, I was beyond distraught. I think that experience was perhaps another reason for my decision to take leave from the academy.

More recently, I've written several pieces on the escalating environmental crisis in the hope of doing my small part in awakening the world to what we're are up against and what can be done about it. One is entitled Race Against Time. The link to the piece is available at https://medium.com/p/167d0def1d9a. The other is entitled A Springtime Bout of Cognitive Dissonance. The link to that piece is available at https://medium.com/p/7aeea16006f3. The first addresses the challenges of the climate crisis and the technological and lifestyle changes necessary to stave it off, including the need to drastically reduce our double XL carbon footprint by going on a crash, carbon-light diet. The second piece reflects mostly on the cognitive dissonance we all experience during springtime when we are lulled into an understandable complacency by the joys of nature, when often out of sight and mind the sources and wellsprings of those joys are furiously being extinguished. Those springtime joys are real, the distant realities of the sources of their extinction are abstract except when calamities like massive flooding, hurricanes, and mudslides pummel us out of our somnolence. It's not easy to sustain the thought that all is both very well and very ill at the same time. F. Scott Fitzgerald once reflect that "the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." As he hoped, "One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise." It is incumbent on all of us to rise to that level of first-rate intelligence when it comes to the environmental crisis, as is the case when dealing with the most pressing issues of life. Easier said than done, and cynicism and doomsdayism, which I am as guilty as anyone of being swept up by, can have a paralytic effect.

When I give talks on the climate crisis, the threat at home and abroad to democracy, or the outbreak of hate, bigotry and militarism on a scale not seen since World War II, I do try to end on a hopeful note. I am often asked what keeps me so hopeful. The truth is I do not know. I have my bouts of hopelessness, but in time they always pass. Perhaps, it's what William James, Warren's favorite philosopher, called the "will to live." James was a philosopher of pragmatism. However, like Warren, he lived life like an existentialist, fully despite its absurdity.

SI: Did you continue in political causes, electoral politics?

RB: Not nearly as much as during my undergraduate years. I'm active in local politics, where I feel I can have the greatest impact. I campaigned a bit for Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election, as well as Joe Biden in 2020. I had one letter published in The New York Times a week before the 2016 election, which unfortunately didn't make a difference in the outcome of the election. I put pen to paper when aroused and enraged by such horrific events as the January 6th insurrection and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and hope that what I write has an impact. [Editor's Note: In the election of 2016, Republican candidate Donald Trump defeated Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, and in the election of 2020 Democratic candidate Joseph Biden defeated Republican candidate Donald Trump.]

SI: Yes. You talked about how Students for a Democratic Society was kind of going off in these other directions, and you felt you wanted to separate, create some distance. Then, I have heard from a lot of other people I have interviewed about how the Progressive Labor Movement became more prominent, or a lot of people drifted towards that. Do you remember your own thoughts on that movement and what happened at Rutgers in the area?

RB: As I recall, Progressive Labor (PL) had pretty much taken over the leadership of SDS by the fall of 1969. I could be mistaken, but I don't believe there was much left to the organization when they did. My friend Stu Berman, who had been president of SDS before Najarian and Fine, had left to form Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS). I suspect Stu did so at least in part in reaction to the growing prominence of PL in SDS. I know Stu formed MDS to dissociate from the increasingly robotic and fossilized thinking, and skewed sense of political and societal reality that led to the previous spring's building occupations. How much that mindless transformation had to do with PL worming its way into SDS I'm not sure. However, mindless thinking and robotic sloganeering were characteristic of PL, and the organization alienated just about everyone on campus including those associated with the political left and especially the countercultural left whom they attacked as ferociously as they did the "ruling class" that they claimed had taken over the University administration. For PL, the ubiquitous "ruling class" was the source of all evil and they were thoroughly convinced that they had all the answers to vanquish it.

My only real encounter with PL came in the spring of '69. PL had distributed a quite simple-minded leaflet on campus attacking and grossly distorting Herbert Marcuse's views, and essentially railing against him as a witting or unwitting tool of the mono-evil ruling class. The widely distributed leaflet was in response to a talk that Marcuse had just given at Douglass College. The gross distortions if not outright misrepresentation of Marcuse's views that appeared in the leaflet called for a response. So, because I was familiar with Marcuse's two major works, Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, both of which the author of the leaflet either hadn't read, or read and clearly didn't understand, I submitted a lengthy letter-to-editor to Targum methodically exposing each and every one of the distortions and misrepresentations. Both my letter and the PL leaflet appeared side-by-side on the front page of the April 24th issue of Targum.

PL's takeover of the leadership of SDS was truly SDS' death knell, and along with the Weather Underground and other proponents of criminal and violent forms of protest, the death knell of the movement that the Freedom Fighters and the authors of the Port Huron Statement had inspired and ignited. Sad!

There was another event in the spring of '69 that reflected the sad state of affairs of the radical left and that was quite personally disconcerting. Shortly after I graduated from Rutgers--I believe it was in late May of '69--several individuals associated with the Black Panthers kidnapped at gunpoint an employee at Temple B'nai Abraham in Newark, demanding he reveal where Rabbi Prinz lived. The apparent objective was to extort money from the rabbi, though it wasn't clear what other intentions they may have had. Not long after the kidnapping, the synagogue itself was set afire. Thankfully, the fire was contained and the Black leaders of Newark united to rebuke the attacks, offering their full-throated condolences and support for one of the most fervent champions of the Civil Rights Movement and one who was actively involved in it both nationally and in Newark long before it was fashionable to do so.

SI: Was there that kind of tension between the Black Student Movement and the more white leftist movement on the Rutgers campus?

RB: None that I experienced at Rutgers. I was personally on very good terms with several of the leaders of the Black campus leadership, including Gene Robinson, Bruce Hubbard, and the great Rutgers football star whose name escapes me.

SI: Are you talking about Bryant Mitchell?

RB: Yes, Bryant Mitchell.

SI: Yes.

RB: There's an amusing, personal story that just popped into my head about Bryant. During my sophomore year, Bryant would often hang out at the Ledge with Najarian, Fine, Berman and myself at a corner table, where we would plot strategies and play Dylan songs on the juke box. One day Bryant walks into the Ledge, sees me and says, "Hey Alex, how ya doin!" For the next year or so, I was called Alex. Why he called me Alex, I have no clue. Why it stuck must have had something to do with his magnetic personality and stature as an astonishing football player. [Editor's Note: Bryant Mitchell, who graduated from Rutgers College in 1969, is a 1992 Rutgers Football Hall of Fame inductee and Vietnam veteran. His oral history interview is available on the Rutgers Oral History Archives website.]

Certainly, there was an understandable distancing from Black campus leaders after the assassination of Martin Luther King, but the relationship with Bryant and other Black leaders that I knew before that tragic day remained respectable. As a graduate student, I got to know Clement Price, who sadly passed away several years ago. He was a wonderful person and an esteemed historian whose intimate knowledge of Newark's past was unmatched except possibly by Charles Cummings. [Editor's Note: Clement A. Price was a Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at Rutgers-Newark.]

SI: We are past noon and what I was thinking is maybe we would end today. Is there anything else you would like to add to this session?

RB: One thing I was just wondering. Are there any history professors from the '60s and '70s still teaching at Rutgers, or has the department been replaced by an entirely new generation?

SI: It is pretty much all a new generation. Rudy Bell had been teaching until somewhat recently, and he just passed away unfortunately recently.

RB: Yes, I well remember Rudy. He was a burst of energy and quite versatile. I don't recall anyone making the kind of scholarly leap from early American political history to Italian history that he made. Apparently, he did it masterfully, as he became a highly-respected Italian historian.

SI: Yes, I cannot think of anybody else. Norman Markowitz is still there, but he was a little later, I think. [Editor's Note: Norman Markowitz is an associate professor of history at Rutgers. He joined the faculty in 1971.]

RB: Actually, I knew Norman quite well as a graduate student at Rutgers and greatly admired his biography of Henry Wallace. [Editor's Note: The Rise and Fall of the People's Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 is a book by Norman Markowitz that was published in 1973.]

SI: Yes.

RB: He must be pushing eighty. Good for him that he's still teaching!

SI: Yes, yes.

RB: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to revisit and share with you some of the highlights of my long-ago past, especially those quite memorable years at Rutgers.

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Transcribed by Jesse Braddell 8/8/2022
Reviewed by Zach Batista 11/1/2022
Reviewed by Kathryn Tracy Rizzi 6/29/2023
Reviewed by Robert Berkowitz 10/26/2023