At the end of May, Princeton had its first Reunions in two years since COVID caused the event to be canceled, bringing together multiple generations of Princeton alumni for the first time in more than two years. In town for his 52nd reunion, Jimmy Tarlau ‘70 sat down with me during the P-rade to discuss his experiences as a student activist at Princeton during the Vietnam War.
“I come to reunions every so often because I feel I have this as part of my heritage, too,” Tarlau explained. “But I won’t go into the P-rade because the P-rade is this kind of celebration of elite privilege in our society. I mean, it’s changed a little bit in terms of who’s there. But for my year, it’s just horrendous.”
At first, when writing this series, I thought I would just focus on Tarlau’s recollections and thoughts on this turbulent time in Princeton’s history. However, after reading William Tucker’s Princeton Radicals of the 1960s, Then and Now, a book on the activities of Princeton anti-war activities that Mr. Tarlau kindly gifted me, I wanted to dig deeper. Using Tucker’s research as a jumping-off point, I took advantage of the Daily Princetonian’s article archive and the meeting notes of the Board of Trustees during the time period to reconstruct the SDS’s anti-war activities more broadly. I hope you enjoy!
Pre-Princeton
Tarlau grew up in New York City on the Upper West Side. “My father was a lawyer. We weren’t red diaper babies,” he admitted. “My father was what they called a Stevensonian Democrat, which is like a very intellectual Democrat, wasn’t a John Kennedy kind of person.” Stevensonian democrats took their name from Adalai Stevenson, who was the Democratic Party nominee in 1956 and 1960.
Tarlau attended Elizabeth Irwin High School in the early to mid-1960s, the Little Red Schoolhouse’s school for upper grade levels. Located in Greenwich Village, it is well known for its politically progressive curriculum and notable alumni ranging from activists to members of the entertainment industry who have haunted its halls. “It had a lot of lefty professors,” Tarlau told me. “Woody Guthrie’s kids were in my class. Angela Davis went to my high school and Kathy Boudin.” Boudin was part of the Weathermen, a militant left-wing organization that perpetrated multiple bombings targeting banks and government buildings.
At the same time, Tarlau himself was not a radical while he attended. “I was one of the more conservative persons in my high school,” he explained. Tarlau was committed to electoral politics and volunteered for the re-election campaign of William Fitz Ryan, a progressive Congressional candidate for the Upper West Side. Tarlau would go on to work for him in Washington over successive summers.
Surprisingly enough, it wouldn’t be until he got to Princeton that his left-wing political beliefs truly took shape. Tarlau’s reasoning for going to Princeton was like many students today. “I applied to a number of schools, and Princeton was the one Ivy League school I got into. I didn’t want to go to Columbia because it was too close to home. I was attracted to the Woodrow Wilson school.”
The tumult in American politics, which shattered trust and hope in political leaders and the American government, was also an important factor in shaping Tarlau’s and other young student’s political identity:
“My heroes growing up were people like Kennedy and Johnson and Humphrey, and the Democrats who were in leadership were the ones who were perpetuating what we thought was a genocidal war. So, it became like something is wrong with the system, and that kind of made me move more to the left.”
In fact, Tarlau was sure his life would have taken a different path if he hadn’t been molded by the blatant atrocities of the time period:
“For me, if I was five years young or five years older, I would have been a lawyer, probably for some Senator or been in administration or something like that. But just because of Vietnam, there was this whole sense that the people who I honored were the ones who were screwing up the country both in the racial riots in the late sixties and that something more fundamental was wrong in the country.”
There were also specific aspects of the Princeton experience that propelled Tarlau towards the left: “One was the culture shock. I went from a co-ed high school in Greenwich Village to the all-male obnoxious attitude here [at Princeton].” Additionally, there were no groups on campus who held Tarlau’s more liberal political views. “The only thing to the left of the Republicans was SDS. There were really no kind of progressive, I mean, liberal organizations on campus. You still had Whig-Clio, but that’s kind of stupid stuff, debate, that kind of stuff. That’s for people who don’t have a real sense of beliefs. And so, I got attracted to SDS because they were also the brightest people on campus.”
Tarlau is referring to Students for a Democratic Society. The organization began in 1960 as a national left-wing group that organized college students to participate in social movements and agitated against the problems plaguing America like poverty and racial injustice. Ideologically, the organization was committed to a reformist program of making America more democratic so all could have real power in governance. The SDS was active in the early 1960s, working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize sit-ins for civil rights; however, it was still fairly small with only 2,500 members nationally in 1964. When President Johnson instituted the draft to send soldiers to Vietnam, the SDS came out strongly against the war, increasing their national profile and membership. The organization also became more willing to agitate against US policies and more committed to fundamentally restructuring the institutions of the US government, following various Marxist tendencies. Despite the multiple left-wing contingencies in their ranks, the organization still convened for annual national conventions.
Princeton’s chapter of SDS formed in fall 1965, holding an anti-war demonstration when President Johnson spoke at Princeton and protesting against military recruiters on campus. Tarlau joined the group in fall 1966. Tarlau remembered his first public involvement with social movements on campus was when he wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian defending Stokely Carmichael’s recent speech at Princeton. The common belief on campus, as Tarlau explained, was that “Black power was an anti-white thing.” Tarlau recalled his position saying, “It wasn’t an anti-white thing. [The Black Panthers] were trying to make African Americans come together to have a more political clout.”
The Princeton SDS was trying to stay in-step with other student anti-war protesters across the country. In early November of 1966, SDS, in partnership with other anti-war groups including the Princeton Ad Hoc Committee to Bring About Negotiations in Vietnam and the Princeton Area Committee to End the War in Vietnam, held a march and demonstration at a Princeton football game. Tarlau, who was the spokesperson for the march’s planning committee, cited protests happening nationwide at the same time as a reason for demonstration that day, saying “It is in tune for Princeton to do the same thing.”
Another example of SDS’s early activities was picketing army recruiters stationed in Frist Campus Center in March 1967. During lunch, they marched around the cafeteria and held up large color photos of Vietnam War victims. In a quote he gave to the Daily Princetonian that day, Tarlau explained, “We are trying to dissuade people who might want to enlist. Our pictures are designed to bring home what the war really means.”
However, the group had some growing to do before it reached the organization and militancy it attained a few years down the line. “The first year I was there it was kind of lame organization. Not bad,” Tarlau explained. “We had, I think it was called the Cellar, underneath where the Princetonian was [for] our office. And they only had seven or eight people there, and not much happened.” In comparison to the years to come, not much might have happened, but SDS still managed to hold people’s attention with demonstrations, events, and press.
As Tarlau’s political fervor grew, he contemplated whether Princeton was the best place to contribute the most to left-wing organizing. “I thought about dropping out of college my freshman year and joining what’s called VISTA.” VISTA is a US government program that sends members to work with anti-poverty organizations around the country, akin to a domestic peace corp. However, Tarlau cites his modern European history course with one of his mentors, Prof. Arnold Maier, as a reason why he remained at Princeton, also no doubt solidifying his decision to concentrate in history. “I decided that my job was not to leave, but actually to change what I was doing,” Tarlau concluded.
Change in Tactics
During the summer of 1967, the SDS made plans for their new direction in the coming school year. As a group, they realized that aesthetic acts of protest weren’t having any material effect on the issues they cared about. In many cases, Tarlau knew that the audience for any shocking stunts at Princeton would be people not receptive to their message in the first place. “One of our planned activities in June of 67 was to put posters of Napalm Babies all over campus before reunions just to kind of shock people, but we weren’t trying to organize the alumni, so what’s the point?” Tarlau mused. The same went for their sports game demonstrations. “We actually decided that the people who go to those games, they are not the people who we want to try to attract,” Tarlau added.
Furthermore, Tarlau felt that protesting by itself wasn’t effective. “We decided that just having a demonstration, people didn’t treat it seriously here.” Tarlau went on to say:
“Instead of just kind of writing a letter or going to a demonstration and then going back to your job, we fundamentally believed that we had to change our own lives and change the institutions we were in. So, we didn’t believe that you could be a weekend protester. This is something that’s fundamental. We had to actually bring the war home, meaning make people confront their own lives and confront the institutions, and the ties between Princeton and the military.”
Tarlau went to his first national SDS convention in June 1967 and had the opportunity to strategize with fellow student activists from around the country about how they could have a material detrimental effect on the US’s war effort. “The first activity was that we found out there was a defense institute called the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA),” Tarlau related.
The IDA was a non-profit created in 1956 at the behest of the Eisenhower administration. The government was in the process of investing in high-tech weapons like nuclear weapons to fight Communism worldwide. Composed of a consortium of elite universities, the universities’ professors would advise on new technologies that could help the military attain its goals not only in defense but also in counterinsurgency and riot control. While not one of the founding members of the IDA, Princeton had a special relationship with the organization because it housed its Communications and Research Division in John von Neumann Hall.
Before this division of the IDA was housed in Neumann Hall, professors on Princeton’s Research Board had expressed concern with the organization coming to campus. However, Princeton’s Board of Trustees, who had free reign over the university’s finances and building projects, had Neumann Hall built to house the IDA before the school became a member. One notable member of the board of the trustees at the time was John N. Irwin, who had served as Eisenhower’s deputy assistant secretary of defense. With Princeton’s connection to the IDA literally set in stone, president of Princeton, Robert Goheen, ignored the Research Board and solidified Princeton as an official member in 1960, citing merely that the university already collaborated with the group unofficially. He even joined the board of the IDA himself.
The IDA’s work was officially top secret, but their annual reports give a window into their objectives. An article published in the Prince in the following school year in fall of 1976 gives a comprehensive overview of IDA’s activities. Tarlau explained to me some of their initiatives:
“The worst part of IDA were these research projects they would do, like if we drop a nuclear bomb in Vietnam, how many people would be killed? What are the ramifications of using tactical nuclear weapons? Those kinds of studies and the fact that university professors were getting money to fund that kind of stuff was unconscionable.”
This sort of collaboration was not unusual for Princeton. Evidence for this can be found on the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library’s (MML) website in the digitized Board of Trustee Records. According to a report to the Board of Trustees made by the Dean of the Engineering School, J. C. Elgin, in Fall 1957, collaboration with the government in military activities was an accepted part of the culture of Princeton’s Engineering School during the time period and was considered essential to the faculties’ “professional growth.” Elgin cited a laundry list of points of contact specifically between the aeronautical engineering professors and the U.S. military (pg. 82 to 87 of the 1957-1958 Board of Trustees Records in Board of Trustees Records, 1746-2021 Collection):
“Aeronautical Engineering Faculty have continued their contributions to the Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and they have acted in advisory consulting capacities to such other organizations like the Defense Department (Assistant Secretary for Research and Development); U.S. Army Scientific Advisory Panel; U.S. Navy (ONR); U.S. Weapon System Evaluation Group of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the United States Airforce; the Institution of Aeronautical Sciences, and to several aeronautical and aircraft companies.”
When Tarlau went back to his congressional internship with Congressman Ryan, he used his government access to learn more about Princeton’s connections with the US government. “These generals came in with these lists of these contracts they had with the University,” he explained to me. “I used to get research on grants that the defense companies were giving universities.” Ryan, who had known Tarlau since high school, was willing to turn a blind eye to Tarlau’s snooping. Tarlau’s findings align with the Board of Trustee Records available on the Mudd Library’s website. According to the minutes of the Trustee’s Committee on Finance meeting in January 1967, the University was contracting out its research facilities in Princeton and the Forrestal Campus about three miles away to the Department of Defense (pg. 571-577 of the 1966 to 1967 Board of Trustees Records).
Tarlau’s research was the foundation of the Princeton SDS’s campaign against the IDA in the Fall of 1967. With a precise target identified that allowed them to disrupt the war effort, the SDS spent the summer planning how it would deliver its campaign against the IDA.
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