To The Case Western Reserve University Observer:
I write as one of your five founders. The CWRU Observer was founded in the late Jon Poole’s room in Cutler House in the spring of 1969 by Jon, Doug Smock, Blake Lange, Larry Levner and myself. We had all been given draft cards, subject to being called into the Vietnam War, then raging at fever pitch.
I received my draft card from a clerk in Adelbert Main Building on my 18th birthday a few months before that fateful meeting. This gave rise to all-night discussions in Clarke Tower as to whether or not it was worse to kill someone who had no ability to travel across the Pacific Ocean to threaten oneself or one’s neighbors, or whether it was better to die so as not to kill for no good reason.
We were all editors of the Reserve Tribune, the Western Reserve College newspaper, except for Blake, who was the editor of the Case Tech, the Case college newspaper. As Case and Western Reserve had federated two years before, in 1967, we decided we should merge the student newspapers. The faculty and administration were largely in support of this idea.
We also decided that we would take a leadership role in the national anti-war movement by writing about it all the time. I was the last sports editor of the Reserve Tribune and the first news editor of The Observer.
We supported the University Undergraduate Student Government (UUSG) in bringing the national Student Mobilization Committee (SMC) conference to CWRU in February 1970. Student delegates from every major university in the country came to CWRU to determine how we were going to convince the federal government to stop a wrong-headed war that was of no benefit to the United States citizenry. We devoted a whole issue of The Observer to this national conference.
In the middle of this three-day gathering of the nation’s leading university students, I coordinated all our CWRU Observer news reporters from The Observer office in Thwing Hall. I kept track of each one on a large blackboard with white chalk. I sent one reporter to each “teach-in” and seminar on how to end the war. These were held in classrooms all around CWRU, with the convention itself held in the Adelbert Gymnasium. I was 19 years old at the time.
As I was doing this in February 1970, in walked John Kifner, the Revolutions Reporter for the New York Times, unannounced. I had no idea he was coming. I was born and raised in New York City, and my fourth grade public school teacher, Mrs. Gertrude Weiner, taught us that an educated person reads The New York Times every day. And so I have, 63 years and counting. On that day in 1970, I had been reading it daily for 10 years, so I knew exactly who John Kifner was and how remarkable it was that he showed up in the CWRU Observer office in Cleveland, 500 miles from New York City.
He asked me, point blank, “What is this anti-war movement all about?” I knew immediately that this was a historic opportunity, so I told him everything you see written above.
In November 1969, we traveled to Washington for the great national march to end the war. I wrote the story of it in the backseat of Larry Levner’s white Ford Sedan on the way back to Cleveland in the middle of the night. It appeared on the front page of the Nov. 18, 1969, issue. This was widely acclaimed at CWRU as the best account of this largest demonstration in American history, far better than the mainstream newspapers of the time.
Fifty-five years later, I still have this front page Observer story of Nov. 18, 1969, framed and hanging on the wall of my study together with the draft card given to me by a CWRU clerk in Adelbert Main on my 18th birthday.
We largely succeeded. The draft ended. No American citizen has been forced, against his will, to fight in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine or the Middle East. We have a volunteer army now. The Vietnam War ended, at a terrible cost—3 million Vietnamese were killed, and 58,250 American soldiers my age never lived to write the story of how we ended it through massive peaceful protest, First Amendment writings and civil disobedience.
To understand how all this fits in today’s issues, one must take the CWRU courses in Western Civilization and 20th Century American History, as I did at the time. There one learns that December 7, 1941, was the beginning of a new era in world history. The United States was bombed by Japan in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, at the same time our shipping lanes were attacked by Nazi German U-boats stationed off the coast of North Carolina and Long Island, New York.
The Pentagon was brand new in 1942. A national consensus developed then that the United States would always maintain a military large enough to fight off invaders in both the Pacific and the Atlantic at the same time. That meant we had to have the biggest, best military in the world. And so we do, up to and including today.
But how shall that unprecedented military might be used and when? That is a question facing every generation since 1942. After the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945, the concept of limited war was developed. Atomic weapons are so powerful that they can wipe out the entire world population. Thus a new era came about—war with less than all the military power a nation owns.
Commencing in October 2023, the Houthis of Yemen have continually attacked commercial ships from many different nations carrying cargo of all sorts in the Red Sea, a major international trade route. The Houthis are backed by the Government of Iran and its wholly owned bank, Bank Melli, which has a branch in New York.
Since the end of World War II, the United States Navy has patrolled the sea lanes of the world, reflecting our 1942 consensus that we should be impervious to attack from the Atlantic and the Pacific at the same time. The United States Navy, with assistance from its allies, has been engaged in a limited war with the Houthis, all during the past two years.
On April 13, 2024, the Government of Iran extensively bombed the State of Israel, a country with a population that is 25% Palestinian Christians and Muslims. Iran dropped 170 armed drones, 30 cruise missiles and 120 ballistic missiles on the State of Israel that day, trying to accomplish Holocaust II. They tried this stunt again on October 1, 2024, with between 180 to 200 ballistic missiles.
Recall that the more primitive Nazis tried this in 1934 to 1945 by erecting death camps all over Europe and trying to kill all the Jewish people of Europe one at a time. They boasted six million kills, including Jews, Gypsies, gay people and political dissidents. All Jews were victims, but not all victims were Jews. The world agreed that the remaining Jewish people of Europe were thus entitled to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland, then the British colony of Palestine, now the State of Israel, since 1948.
On April 13, 2024, and again on October 1, 2024, Israel’s Palestinian Christians and Muslims were saved together with Israel’s Jewish population by the Iron Dome, an anti-missile system manufactured in Arizona, Alabama and Israel and largely funded by the Pentagon.
The people of Gaza have been governed by a terrorist organization called Hamas for the past 18 years. The Government of Iran continues to fund Hamas, and to deprive the people of Gaza of the right to elect their own government that does not attack its neighbors.
Defacing CWRU property is not at all the kind of protest we staged in 1969-1970. Everyone interested in stopping Iran from disrupting the world’s shipping lanes should be picketing the Bank Melli of Iran’s offices in New York all the time every day and the Government of Iran’s embassies and consulates in New York and Washington all the time every day until Iran backs off.
The goal of these massive protests must be first to get them to stop trying to destroy international shipping in the Red Sea as the Nazis tried to do in the Atlantic in 1942, and second to allow the people of Gaza to choose their own government, not one that engages in warfare with its neighbors on behalf of a government in Tehran that has sworn to adopt the Nazi policies of destroying the civilian population of Palestinian Christians and Muslims and Israeli Jews through heavy bombing.
In 1969-1970, when chaos ruled Washington, the CWRU Observer and UUSG had a hand in running the country. Can you have a hand today in refocusing vigorous protest where it belongs—against the government and Central Bank of Iran? Can you unite the pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli communities in this effort?
If we did it 55 years ago, so can you.