Bernard Maisner

The rites of Princeton University’s 221st Commencement played out on the sun-swept lawn of Nassau Hall on June 11, 1968, after a semester of national torment and heartbreak.

Former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg received an honorary degree, along with the poet Marianne Moore; John Doar ’44, the Justice Department’s point man in civil-rights battles across the South; and other luminaries. In the folding seats stretching back to FitzRandolph Gate sat the 756 graduates in the Class of 1968 and 514 master’s- and doctoral-degree recipients, and their families. The last months of their Princeton experience had unfolded against a blur of tragedies and stunning events: the Tet offensive, the abrupt end of draft deferments for graduate school, incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson’s withdrawal from the presidential race, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the ensuing riots in Trenton and 100 other cities, the strike that shut down Columbia University, and, finally, the bullets that felled Sen. Robert F. Kennedy moments after he celebrated his triumph in California’s Democratic primary.

Frank Wojciechowski

“That whole spring, the country was really in turmoil, plus you’d had the riots, the cities on fire,” says Kenneth Michaelchuck ’68.

Courtesy Eric L. Chase ’68

“One of the things I liked about the Class of ’68 [was that] there was a lot of protesting going on, a lot of disagreement, and it was fine,” says Eric L. Chase ’68.

Courtesy William Brundige ’68

The draft led architecture major William Brundige ’68 into teaching, where he happily remains.

There had been talk of canceling the P-Rade on Saturday, the day of the Kennedy funeral. Instead, it was curtailed, confined to campus instead of winding through town. “It felt like nothing was ever going to be the same, here or anywhere else,” remembers Timothy McFeeley ’68, who would spend that summer touring Europe with the Princeton and Smith glee clubs. The group had stops in Paris, where students were rioting on Bastille Day, and Prague, enjoying a last month of liberty under Alexander Dub¹cek before Warsaw Pact tanks crushed the “Prague Spring.”

It had been a year when Princeton, too, faced rising protests — not only over the war and the campus outpost of the Institute for Defense Analyses, but over dormitory rules and divestiture from businesses dealing with apartheid South Africa. Coeducation was on the horizon (Professor Gardner Patterson and his committee were at work), but still a year away. Sociologist Suzanne Keller that spring became the first woman appointed to a tenure-track faculty position, but Suzanne Gossett *68, a student in the early days of coeducation in the Graduate School and now a professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, says some professors seemed astonished that she actually sought a job after completing her doctorate.

“I always describe 1968 as the worst year that ever was — one damn thing after another,” says William H. Earle ’69, a Baltimore writer and editor. “I remember a lot of it as terrifying.” Earle unexpectedly was thrust into the center of controversy over the dorm restrictions known as parietals at the end of exam week in January 1968. His girlfriend was visiting from Bryn Mawr. A proctor — one of the University’s seven-member, plainclothes security force — knocked on Earle’s Cuyler Hall door at 10:30 p.m. to deliver a routine notice from the English department. “Come in,” Earle called out, only to be peremptorily told by the proctor that his visitor must leave, since it was after 7 p.m. on a weeknight (the hours extended to midnight on weekends). But his girlfriend had no other place to spend the night, and Earle stoutly refused to comply. “I said a lot of things. I was pretty annoyed, but I did take her out eventually,” he recalls. He found room for her that night at a married student’s place in town. Earle was hauled before a disciplinary committee and, for refusing to agree to obey the rules in the future, ordered to withdraw for a year.

The case quickly became a cause célèbre. The Prince originally planned to run an account playing the incident for laughs, but “it was anything but comic to me. We managed to get it rewritten as a serious news story,” says Earle. Student leaders intervened on his behalf, and a compromise was struck: Earle’s punishment was changed to probation and the dean of students let it be known that while parietals would stay on the books, there were no plans to enforce them, according to Marc E. Lackritz ’68, the president of the Undergraduate Assembly.

Writing in a 1968 Bric-a-Brac essay titled “Going Forward” instead of “Going Back,” David S. Gould ’68 described that senior year: “Miraculously, the clouds started to part, and for the first time in 67 years, the 20th century threatened to break through.” Gould — lawyer, speechwriter, and wag — was a “ferocious” supporter of the Commit-tee for Coeducation, a student group. “The absence of women was the greatest drawback to my Princeton education,” he wrote in the class’s 35th-reunion book. Noting that the class was among the first with more public- than private-school graduates, Gould opined, “Our class must have driven the administration crazy. Even though the Princeton Class of ’68 was still far behind other schools in social activism, we were doing things that were unheard of in the lore of Princeton University.”

Kenneth Michaelchuck ’68 skipped graduation for his honeymoon. He and his high school sweetheart, Kathleen, had wed back home in Paulsboro, N.J., on Saturday, June 8; they’d set the date without checking on graduation. Michael-chuck, a construction worker’s son, already had enlisted in the Army and had a job waiting with Procter & Gamble. “That whole spring, the country was really in turmoil, plus you’d had the riots, the cities on fire,” says Michaelchuck, who became a Miller Brewing executive and later vice president and CIO of Philip Morris Co. “When I enlisted in May I had to go to Newark. I got off the train to go to the federal building, and the city had been burned out. I kept thinking to myself, ‘Vietnam can’t be any worse than this.’ It looked like a war zone.” The Army sent Michaelchuck to Alaska instead of Vietnam.

Not everyone remembers the summer of ’68 as a season of torment. “I didn’t feel it as a hectic spring,” says Roger S. Cooper ’68, one of 78 graduating seniors commissioned into the Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marines. “Except for getting my thesis done, I didn’t feel any pressure. It was very pleasant. ... I was unaffected by the turmoil going on in the rest of the world, in all honesty.” Cooper, a statistics major, made the Navy his career. He captained a guided-missile frigate and became an arms-control negotiator. Now a defense analyst, he says, “People always ask me, ‘What about SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] on campus and things like that?’ SDS? It was like the Senate used to be, where the Republicans and the Democrats disagreed, but they talked to each other. The same thing with ROTC and SDS. I had close friends who didn’t believe in what I was doing, but they didn’t get violent or anything. I didn’t experience that at Princeton, ever.” SDS even challenged ROTC to a game of touch football over Yale weekend. The radicals won.

Future Marine officer Eric L. Chase ’68 remembers sitting on the edge of his seat at Commencement, ready to get on with life and “with a certain eagerness to go to war.” His father, Harold W. “Hal” Chase ’43 *54, back for his own 25th reunion, had sworn in Eric as a Marine officer the day before. The elder Chase, a political scientist and former Princeton professor, was a colonel and later a major general in the Marine Reserves who had returned to active duty and led an amphibious assault battalion in Vietnam, his third war. Eric Chase, a wrestler at Andover and Princeton, would be wounded in Vietnam leading a combat patrol in Que Sanh in 1970. In June 2006, he swore in his own son, Eric ’06, and two classmates as Marine officers; the son is now serving in Iraq. The father does his battles these days in the courtroom as a commercial litigator. It troubles him that the military is no longer part of life for most Princetonians. “One of the things I liked about the Class of ’68 [was that] there was a lot of protesting going on, a lot of disagreement, and it was fine,” says Chase. “That’s not true anymore. You get a lot of disparagement of views that don’t conform to what most people want to hear.”

Air Force ROTC product Hervey Stockman Jr. ’68, known as Peter, also received his diploma on Commencement morning, uncertain whether his father, Air Force fighter pilot Hervey S. Stockman ’44, had survived the crash of his plane over North Vietnam in June 1967. Eighteen more months would pass before Peter and his mother got confirmation that the elder Stockman was a POW; he spent nearly six years in Hanoi prisons and emerged to write a paper for the Air Force War College on how and why so many U.S. aviators survived that ordeal as well as they did. The son says his father had encouraged him to join ROTC at Princeton “because he was concerned about Vietnam.” He did so, and the Air Force allowed the young officer to pursue his Ph.D. in physics afterward; Stockman became a top NASA scientist and deputy director of the Hubble Space Telescope program, and is now head of the James Webb Space Telescope Mission Office. Asked if the vocal anti-war students on campus that spring bothered him, Stockman says, “Maybe a little bit, but on the other hand I could see why they were upset with the war. ... It’s hard to be for a war in which the government you’re supporting clearly is not very strong.”

Benjamin R. Foster ’68 returned to his dorm for one last check of the mail after the graduation ceremony and found a draft board notice reclassifying him 1-A, subject to being drafted immediately. He wound up as an ammunition specialist in Vietnam before returning to graduate school at Yale. “I felt I’d lost two years of my life, but there it was, and I was highly motivated. I could hardly wait to open a book, and I couldn’t bear to put a book down. Military service was a colossal motivator,” says Foster, a Yale professor of Assyriology and Babylonian literature. He laments that Americans now are dying in another “pointless and stupid war.”

The draft and Vietnam led architecture major William Brundige ’68 to detour into teaching. His draft board renewed his deferment when he signed up to teach at an inner-city Los Angeles junior high. Later, after earning a master’s degree in architecture at the University of Southern California, he found that teaching, not architecture, had become his passion. He is still in the Los Angeles public schools, teaching six sections a day of technical arts, 41 students to the class, at Fairfax High School. He teaches summer school as well. He stuck with teaching, he says, “because of the happiness that it’s brought me all these years.”

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