“Well, there was the start of the debates about the Vietnam War. And I remember going to one meeting and it was just the start of the split between Old Left and New Left. Old Left being heavily intellectualized, where people would sit around and debate and you sort of make the case. And the New Left wound up wanting just to demonstrate in the streets. At Williams, a very tame place, I remember at this first meeting someone getting up who was a football player of all things. He said, “I want action, action, action!” It was just this emotion at anti-war meetings.

I remember one professor getting up, and this was Robert Gaudino. One of the things he did in one of these sessions was to ask students in that quiet voice of his, “If you don’t go, who will?” It was a stunning question in such a setting. “If you don’t go, who will?” What? What did he say? Well, it was a reminder that if students from privileged schools didn’t go into the military, that would leave the poor kids to go. This professor was challenging the popular cause. I’ve never forgotten that sort of question that would give the students a hard time: If you guys want to avoid the draft and the war and you don’t like it, these poor kids from the inner cities and the South, they are the ones who are going. I had not heard anyone else quite make that case to the face of people who were protesting the war, challenging these kids because a lot of these kids just didn’t want to serve in the Army. People didn’t want to get their ass blown off. Whatever the righteousness of the war or wrongness of it, that certainly was part of the motivation.

–Paul Lieberman '71