Hats off to Raymond Arsenault ’69 for his insightful and honest essay, “It Was Everything, It Was Nothing,” about the coming of the spirit of the ’60s to Princeton (On the Campus, Nov. 13). There is one historical point that I would like to correct or expand upon. It is regarding the first anti-war demonstration on campus, when President Lyndon Johnson came to dedicate the new Woodrow Wilson School building May 11, 1966, one year after the historic buildup of U.S. forces in Vietnam.
When I read that “a dozen faculty ... marched in protest of his escalation of the war in Vietnam,” I thought that perhaps my memory was even worse than I thought. As I remember, there were hundreds of students demonstrating and I was one of them (my first demonstration). With a little searching on Google, I found an entry from the Mudd Library blog that confirmed that I had remembered the event correctly. According to the article, there were “close to 400 Vietnam War protesters” present — and I was, indeed, one of them.
*President Johnson addresses Vietnam in Princeton, 1966 from the Mudd Library blog: “The Reel Mudd” Oct 2010.
https://blogs.princeton.edu/reelmudd/2010/10/president-johnson-addresses...