Brewing Trouble
Herb Dorfman
— I think Gideonse was bothered that we wanted to give the voice to all of these people. In fact, there was an editorial in May — that's what started the whole fuss, it was something in support of LYL. And I think the editorial said “leave them be” or something and he objected to that. And we said, “Well, why not?” I mean, it was America. You know? What the hell! In our heart of hearts we knew the LYL was not going anywhere. It wasn't going to take over America.
Myron Kandel
— The faculty advisor was a Philosophy professor, a very wispy, soft-spoken guy named Julius Portnoy who always claimed to be on our side but he never was. And we always felt that he was in the pocket of the administration. We always thought that he was really the most finky of all.
Ann Lane
— Well, there was Mr. Portnoy telling me Stanley Aronowitz was too political. I mean, I did see through that. And we knew we were having problems with Gideonse. We knew that the newspaper articles were being looked at very carefully. And we actually couldn't figure out why 'cause we weren't Communists.
Herb Dorfman
— I had heard one day that they were bringing ROTC onto the campus. In those days, right after the war and with a student body that was anti-war, bringing ROTC was considered bad form. So I asked around and I couldn't get anything specific, so I did the simplest thing. I called the Army and I said, “We just want to get some information about the ROTC unit that you're setting up here." And of course the Army just told me everything, so I wrote the story. Gideonse didn't like that either. That’s the sort of thing that got him angry.
Rhoda Karpatkin
— We had published something. I'm embarrassed that I can't remember which one thing triggered that. My recollection was that it was the article about the ROTC sneaking back onto campus, but I couldn't swear to that. It could have been something else. Whatever it was, it was a pretext because the administration hated Vanguard, and with good cause because Vanguard was constantly being critical of the school administration.
Harry Baron
— I think that the political climate may have been such that it created extra tension there and it drove him up a wall. Why couldn't he tolerate what we were doing?
Al Lasher
— We were constantly battling with him. We'd run editorials criticizing positions that he would take, policies that he would institute. And he would have fits over it. So that was our war.
Bill Taylor
— My recollection is that most of my colleagues — and again, I was sort of junior at the time — were not expecting that the hammer would fall.