Finding our voice again

This column last appeared in this space 37 years ago. Nineteen sixty-eight was a watershed election year. The country was at war, bogged down in a quagmire in a third world country we did not understand, against a people whose tenacity we arrogantly underestimated. America was bitterly divided, politically, racially, culturally. There were protests in the streets and at the convention of the party in power.

Princeton was also in ferment, but it was one of the few institutions around willing to make itself amenable to reform. In the last half of the 1960s, Princeton changed in remarkable ways. Out went the chapel rule, the car rule and parietal hours. Student power, not just student freedom, was the call of the day. The self-perpetuating University Council, owned by Nassau Hall, gave way to the Undergraduate Assembly, where members were actually elected by the student body. Later, this experiment in self-government was expanded to include the entire Princeton community.

In these same years, students rebelled against the abuses of Bicker and the selective eating club system. A mass resignation of upperclassman (led by members of the most selective clubs) influenced the administration to establish non-selective clubs and to think seriously of alternative arrangements. Finally, and most significantly, Princeton decided to admit women, and changed its face for the better forever.

The passionate engagement with these national and campus issues, and writing about them in the 'Prince,' made my Princeton experience particularly memorable. But I put down my pen and went to law school to learn how to take up the sword in service of the values I held dear. Times changed quickly. With Richard Nixon' s election, the country moved decisively to the right, a course which has continued virtually uninterrupted to the present day.

Meanwhile, I learned how to try cases to juries. For most of my career, I have been a civil rights lawyer, representing victims of police and other governmental misconduct and of employment discrimination by both public and private employers. Endeavoring to vindicate victims' rights one case at a time in an increasingly hostile political and judicial environment, it has been my experience that the sword may not ultimately be as mighty as the pen.

In the last 37 years, Princeton has fared much better, under wiser stewardship, than has the nation. America is, if anything, more divided — by class, wealth and race — than ever before. We have less of a sense of community, less of a broad middle class, than we did then. Even when we were traumatized by 9/11, how long did that resurgence in community feeling last? Our culture has coarsened, celebrating celebrity and the individual accumulation of great wealth. We have the richest elite in the world, but less of a social safety net for the rest of us.

We have let our public institutions — our schools, our public health system, our public infrastructure — deteriorate dangerously in many of our cities and towns across the country. The privileged now buy privately for themselves great schools and great health care and convenient private transportation, both on the ground and in the air. So who cares that those public institutions no longer work so well for the rest of our citizens? Or that they feel more insecure about the future of their families than ever before, while the rich just get richer? How much longer can we ignore the deterioration at home and the vast poverty, misery and violence abroad?

In 1968, I wrote about the sacrifice of our national values in pursuing the Vietnam War, and in one column, "the persistent and systemic violations by American soldiers of what used to be standards of human decency, even in time of war," including "the treatment of prisoners . . . the indiscriminate killing of civilians, and the adoptions of policies and weapons that produce a tremendous number of civilian casualties."

Today, we are doing it again, at Abu Ghraib and in the streets of Iraqi cities. In Vietnam, we "pacified" the prosperous village of Ben Suc, utterly destroying it (and interning its surviving inhabitants) in order to save it. How far we are willing to go to "save" Iraq remains to be seen, but there can be no doubt about the havoc we are wreaking in our war of Iraqi "liberation." It may be wishful thinking, but I sense for the first time in many years that the time has come when we can mobilize again to try to change the course of all this. I'm not putting down my sword, but I am going to try to find my voice by picking up my pen again. I invite you to join me. Robert L. Herbst '69 is a lawyer from Larchmont, N.Y. He can be reached at rlherbst@aol.com.