Dozens of students. But which students, Ferguson wanted to know, and what were their names? And who were the experienced veterans of the anti-war and civil rights movements who had been roughed up by the police at earlier demonstrations? No undergraduate working for the Columbia Daily Spectator would have been allowed to publish such a piece, not without providing direct quotations along with the identities of the students who had made those comments, if indeed any of them had been made. Was this a news story, Ferguson asked himself, or an editorial posing as a news story? And what, pray tell, was the definition of the word “gentle”?
Another front-page article on May first was written by Rosenthal himself, a curiously disjointed, rambling mélange of sorrows, impressions, and angry disbelief. “It was 4:30 in the morning,” the first paragraph began, “and the president of the university leaned against the wall of the room. This had been his office. He passed a hand over his face. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘how could human beings do a thing like this?’ … He wandered about the room. It was almost empty of furniture. The desks and chairs had been smashed, broken and shoved into adjoining rooms by the occupying students…”
On page 36 of that same morning’s edition of the Times, another article told of the damage done to various rooms and offices by the occupiers of Mathematics Hall. Shattered windows, an overturned cabinet of library index cards, dismembered desks and chairs, cigarette burns on carpets, tipped-over filing cabinets, broken doors. “A secretary, returning to the building for the first time since it was seized last Thursday night, looked about disgustedly. ‘They’re just pigs,’ she said.”
The pigs, however, were not the students who had occupied the buildings but the police who had gone into the buildings after the bust. They were the ones who had smashed the desks and chairs, the ones who had tossed streams of dripping black ink against the walls, who had ripped open five- and ten-pound bags of rice and sugar and scattered their contents around offices and classrooms and had dumped broken jars of tomato paste onto floors, desks, and filing cabinets, the ones who had punched out windows with their clubs and nightsticks. If their aim was to discredit the students, the strategy worked, for within hours of that second police rampage scores of photographs attesting to the damage were circulated around the country (the ink-splattered wall was especially popular) and the young rebels were turned into an uncivilized pack of hooligans and thugs, a gang of barbarians whose sole purpose was to destroy the most sacred institutions of American life.
Ferguson knew the real story because he had been one of the Spectator reporters assigned to investigate the charges of vandalism against the occupying students, and what he and his fellow reporters had discovered — through sworn affidavits from members of the faculty — was that no ink had been on the walls when a contingent of professors toured the empty Math building at seven o’clock on the morning of April thirtieth. After they left, only police and press photographers had been allowed to enter the building, and when the professors returned later in the day, they found the walls covered with ink. Ditto for the desks, chairs, filing cabinets, windows, and packages of food. In good condition at seven A.M., pillaged and destroyed by noon.
It didn’t help that the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, was a member of the Columbia board of trustees. Nor that William S. Paley, head of the CBS television network, and Frank Hogan, the Manhattan district attorney, sat on the board as well. Unlike many of his friends, Ferguson was not in the habit of looking for conspiracies to account for the shrouded operations of Nobodaddy’s henchmen, but how not to wonder that America’s most influential newspaper had willfully distorted its coverage of the events at Columbia and that the most influential television network had invited Columbia president Grayson Kirk to appear on Face the Nation but never asked one of the student leaders to give the other side of the story. As for the question of law enforcement, Ferguson and his fellow students on Morningside Heights were all aware of what the police had done both during and after the bust, but no one else seemed terribly interested.
Case closed.
FERGUSON WALKED BACK onto the Columbia campus that September feeling crushed and demoralized. A state of depletion and spent resolve as the August outrages continued to echo inside him, Soviet tanks crossing into Czechoslovakia to exterminate the Prague Spring, Daley calling Ribicoff a motherfucking dirty Jew at the Democratic Convention in Chicago as twenty-three thousand local, state, and federal cops gassed and pummeled young demonstrators and journalists in Grant Park, the mob crying out in unison, The whole world is watching!, and then Ferguson began his senior year with New York in yet another crisis, the deranged spectacle of public school teachers going out on strike to contest community control of the School Board in Ocean Hill — Brownsville, yet one more clash between blacks and whites, race hatred in its ugliest, most suicidal form, blacks against Jews, Jews against blacks, more poison to fill the air as the world turned its eyes to the Olympics that were about to begin in Mexico City, where police battled a horde of thirty thousand protesting students and workers, killing twenty-three of them and arresting thousands, and then, in early November, the twenty-one-year-old Ferguson voted for the first time, and America elected Richard Nixon as its new president.