“Maybe in October of 1967, posters appeared that he was going to be doing an evening seminar on the war. I remember it was at the Van Rensselaer House. It was a huge turnout, I mean just enormous. It was standing room only. And he didn’t lecture, he basically ran it as a class and then he provided a reading list, which had four or five books on it. Several friends of mine and I, we attended all the way through, wouldn’t have missed it. But by the last several meetings it was down to a hard core of maybe 10 people. So I mean the shrinkage was enormous in this particular case. I suspect it had to do with — people had gone to this thing looking for information and Gaudino wasn’t going to give you a wrapped-up package. Again, it was mostly questions. But I think what was sort of memorable about it in terms of adjusting my thinking was he was trying to look at it from the perspective of the Vietnamese, particularly the North Vietnamese. It wasn’t just laying out the case either for or against Vietnam. You may well conclude that these people are horrible, totalitarians, and we’re totally justified in what we’re doing but you needed to try to understand the logic from both sides.

–David Lee '71