From Ferguson’s point of view, it all came down to one essential difference: Amy was a believer, and he was an agnostic.
One night when she was out late with her friends, no doubt arguing with Mike Loeb in a booth at the West End or plotting with Patsy Dugan about how to increase the female membership of SDS, Ferguson crawled into the bed in Amy’s room, the same bed he had slept in for the better part of the past two years, and because he was especially tired that night, he fell asleep before Amy returned. When he woke the next morning, Amy was not in the bed beside him, and when he examined the plumped-up state of her pillow, he concluded that Amy had not come home and had spent the night somewhere else. Somewhere else turned out to be the bed in Ferguson’s room next door, and when he walked into that room to look for a fresh set of socks and underwear, the noise of the creaking parquet floor woke her up.
What are you doing in here? Ferguson asked.
I felt like sleeping alone, she said.
Oh?
It felt good to sleep alone for a change.
Did it?
Yes, very good. I think we should keep on doing it for a while, Archie. You in your bed and me in my bed. What you might call a cooling-off period.
If that’s what you want. It’s not as though it’s been very warm lately when we’ve slept together in the same bed.
Thank you, Archie.
You’re welcome, Amy.
Thus commenced the so-called cooling-off period. For the next six nights, Ferguson and Amy slept alone in their own beds in their own rooms, neither one of them certain if they had come to the end or were merely taking a pause, and on the morning of the seventh day, April twenty-third, just hours after they climbed out of their separate beds and made their separate ways out of the apartment, the revolution began.
SPRING 1968 (II). On March fourteenth, Ferguson and his Spectator comrades had elected Robert Friedman as their new editor in chief, the same March fourteenth on which Amy and her SDS comrades had voted in Mark Rudd as their new chairman, and from one instant to the next both organizations had changed. The paper continued to report the news as it always had, but its editorials became tougher and more outspoken, and Ferguson was pleased that Vietnam and black-white relations and Columbia’s role in prolonging the war were now openly discussed, often pugnaciously discussed, as a matter of policy and conviction. With Students for a Democratic Society, the shift in tactics was even more striking. The national leadership had called for a move from “protest to resistance,” and at Columbia the so-called Praxis Axis contingent had been replaced by the more confrontational Action Faction. Last year, the goal had been education and awareness, the timid gesture of approaching marine recruiters in order to “ask some questions,” whereas now the aim was to provoke, to disrupt, to stir things up as often as possible.
One week after Rudd took over as chairman, the director of the New York headquarters of the Selective Service System, Colonel Paul B. Akst, came to the Columbia campus to deliver a talk at Earl Hall about recent modifications to the draft laws. One hundred and fifty people showed up, and as Akst stepped forward to begin his talk (a squat man bulging in full military garb), there was a commotion at the back of the auditorium. Several students dressed in army fatigues started playing a fife-and-drum rendition of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” while others waved around toy weapons. As if by reflex, a band of jocks leapt forward to quell, repel, and expel the pukes, and with everyone’s attention diverted by the wrangling in back, someone sitting in the front row stood up and threw a lemon meringue pie in Colonel Akst’s face. As in all good slapstick films, it was a direct hit. By the time the audience had turned around again, a side door had mysteriously opened, and the pie thrower and an accomplice had escaped.
That night, Amy told Ferguson that the pastry commando was an SDSer imported from Berkeley and that the accomplice was none other than Mark Rudd. Ferguson was highly amused. Too bad for the colonel, he thought, but no harm done, especially in light of the big harm being done by the war, and what a deft little frolic it had been. The Praxis Axis never would have dreamed of attempting a stunt like that (too frivolous), but the Action Faction was apparently not opposed to using levity as an instrument to make its political points. The administration was furious, of course, promising to “throw the book” at the mischief-maker if it turned out he wasn’t a Columbia student and to suspend him if he was, but one week later the university found itself confronted by a more serious challenge than lemon meringue pies, and the guilty ones were never caught.
At that early stage of the drama, SDS was focusing its activities on two principal issues: the Institute for Defense Analyses and the ban against demonstrating and/or picketing inside university buildings, a new policy that had been initiated by President Grayson Kirk back in the fall. IDA had been set up by the Pentagon in 1956 as a conduit for enlisting the help of university scientists in weapons research for the government, but no one had been aware of Columbia’s connection to the program until 1967, when two members of SDS found documents in the library stacks that referred to Columbia’s membership in IDA, which had twelve university members in all, and now that faculty committees at Princeton and Chicago were recommending to the heads of their schools that they quit the program, students and faculty members at Columbia were asking their university to do the same, even though Kirk had been a member of the board for the past nine years, but how not to feel revulsion over the fact that IDA research had led to the development of chemical herbicides such as Agent Orange, which was being used to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam, or that the bloody tactic of “carpet bombing” was the result of IDA work on counterinsurgency techniques? In other words, Columbia was taking part in the war, it had dirt on its hands (as Amy often put it), and the only sensible action was to force it to stop. Not that the war would stop, but persuading Columbia to stop would constitute a small victory after so many large and small defeats. As for the ban on indoor demonstrations, the students argued that it was a violation of First Amendment rights, an unconstitutional act against the principle of free speech, and therefore Kirk’s dictum was invalid.