This is the final story in a three-part series that looks back on the events of the spring of 1970 at UB.
City police, pushing iron gates, herded crowds of protesters into vans. Two people were pinned to the sidewalk by police as they tried to hang a banner near a library. Hundreds of people were handcuffed, arrested, fingerprinted, and locked up.
A scene from UB in the spring of 1970? Not even close: New York, last fall, at the Republican National Convention.
In Washington, city police encircled a peaceful crowd of several hundred people in a downtown park and arrested all of them, including many bystanders.
A Vietnam War protest in the late Sixties? No - a World Bank protest in 2002.
Those arrests happened just a few blocks from Ian DeWaal's office at the Justice Department.
"They did the same kinds of sweeps as they did back (at UB)," said DeWaal, who was a student at UB in March 1970. "They would cordon off a huge area and arrest everyone. So, maybe a lot of the lessons of that time have been forgotten."
The debate over police tactics toward dissenters is just one part of the Vietnam era legacy that has come alive in recent years.
Many of the questions of that time are once again echoing through UB's halls - 35 years after the tear gas cloud lifted - as the United States fights a long ground war in a foreign country, as dissent grows at home, and as many people say the nation is divided.
The people who lived through that time are rethinking the meaning of what they experienced. And now that many of the same things are at stake, they are telling the story again, to a new generation that's trying to sort out our nation's reaction to war; the meaning of dissent, the role of violent and non-violent protest, and the extent to which difficult times divide our nation.
The story of the UB protests' legacy begins at the spring's frightening climax: when Nixon went into Cambodia and four students at Kent State were shot dead.
Four dead in Ohio
Peace came to the Main Street campus on March 16, when the Buffalo police ended their 17-day occupation.
Then, in late April, Nixon gave the order to invade Cambodia. And on May 4, at Kent State, National Guardsmen shot four students dead.
A new kind of fear gripped the campus.
"When Kent State happened, the emotions were extreme," said Bob Culver, a student activist at the time. "There was anger, fear, a real sense of hopelessness. There was a sense that campuses were under attack."
On May 6, a wall of police drove a student protest march on Main Street back to campus amid a volley of tear gas bombs. Police gassed several campus buildings the next night, and fired birdshot into a crowd of students at Norton Union.
It was that night, more than any other, that UB students said they felt the world was ending.
"Walking out of Norton Union, I was in a Japanese war movie," said Marty Teitelbaum, who was a student in the spring of 1970. "Cops would shoot flares and gas canisters into the air, which would descend on parachutes. The canisters would explode and in the light of the flares you'd see the fumes."
The semester ended early two days later when Acting President Peter Regan let students go home for the semester without penalty. Everyone braced for more conflict in the fall. But when students came back, the campus was peaceful, and so it remained.
That's because by the fall, the United States was pulling out of the Vietnam War, so students began to think of other things, said Christine Ryan, an official at Canisius College who wrote a doctoral thesis on the campus unrest. Also, the economy started to turn, so students began to take their studies more seriously, she said.
Michael Frisch sees it differently. Frisch, a history professor who was an activist at the time, said the energy dissipated so fast because its main source - issues that were immediate to the community, like the police occupation of campus - had been spent by the fall.
While Kent State and Cambodia were major crises, they nationalized the conflict, Frisch said. Just as it seemed to be climaxing, it was being exhausted, because it lost its grounding.
"Great crises can make things happen, but they can't sustain them," Frisch said. "We felt that we were really close to revolution. But by the fall, the moment passed, and nothing happened."
UB has remained calm during the Iraq war for just this reason, by Frisch's analysis. Students become engaged when their private hopes and anxieties are tied into the public debates. But for most UB students today, the war is a distant national issue.
The draft paradox
The main reason why Vietnam was different than Iraq, say the students who lived through that time, was the fear-inspiring threat that hung over them every day - the draft.
The students who protested say their greatest legacy is that they helped get the United States out of Vietnam more quickly, and that their protests help end the draft. Thus, they changed the way the Unites States decided to go to war, because drafting young Americans was no longer an option.
"I think what we did helped keep the United States out of a ground war for 35 years," said Teitelbaum. "The government was hesitant to commit ground troops anywhere in the world without a clear plan."
But the war in Iraq has revealed an irony of the post-draft era, the students say. It's harder for the government to wage a big war, but easier to wage a small war without the approval of the general public.
Were there a draft, the government would not have been able to wage war in Iraq in the first place, because people would have been against the war if they, or their children, could be sent there, according to Gary Friend, a student in the spring of 1970.
"One of the reasons the government has been able to do what it has done in Iraq is that there is no draft," said Friend.
Dissent's role
The UB campuses have remained fairly quiet as the war in Iraq goes on. But people in the United States and across the world have expressed their dissent. Protests in major cities, including Washington and New York, have each drawn hundreds of thousands of people.
Most protests have been peaceful, but some have been tense, and a few have been violent. Nearly 2,000 people were arrested at the Republican convention in September. Police chased, gassed, and arrested a group of 80 protesters at the January inauguration of President Bush for breaking windows in a Washington neighborhood. Protests in Europe have often been more chaotic.
In thinking of how they will protest the war, many people around the world are asking questions that defined the Vietnam era: Is there a place for dissent in a time of war? And if so, what is the right way to express it?
The answer in the spring of 1970 at UB depended largely on where you drew the line between violence and non-violence.
Some people saw all dissent as violent, like a Buffalo attorney who Michael Frisch remembers. At the trial of the Hayes Hall 45, a group of faculty members who were arrested for staging a peaceful sit-in, the prosecution lawyer presented a faculty pamphlet called "Police Off Campus" next to a student pamphlet called "Kill the Pigs" to show a conspiracy between the student radicals and the professors.
"By the time of the police occupation, the distinction between violence and non-violence meant very little," Frisch said.
According to Frisch, this attitude led students to destructive behavior. The distinction gone, students responded to violence with violence; students felt like the establishment had declared war on them.
Others accepted dissent, but drew the line before acts that showed disrespect to authority. Wendee Lorbeer, a student in the spring of 1970, said she will never forget how she felt when she came to campus one day to see that students had spray-painted graffiti on campus buildings.
Still others drew the line before acts of destruction, like Claude Welch, a political science professor who was Dean of Undergraduate Education at the time. Welch said that the firebomb in Lockwood Library that destroyed books and student records symbolized the wrong kind of dissent.
"The university exists for civil discussion," Welch said. "We're not confrontational. We debate."
Shades of each of these groups can be found in America during the war in Iraq. People are revisiting the same questions that faced UB students in 1970, when police roamed the campus, or when Nixon bombed Cambodia: What is the right way for me to express dissent?
And all across the country, as people protest the Iraq war, leaders and law enforcement officials will make the same judgment that faced Peter Regan and Edward Doty that February night when they first called the police to campus; the same decision that faced the judge in the Hayes Hall 45 case; the same discussion that Washington police had before they corralled the World Bank protesters in the park: Against what kinds of dissent should the government unleash its power to capture and detain?
A house divided
As a result of such conflicts, nearly everyone who went through the spring of 1970 at UB said the school was badly divided, though perhaps no two people could agree just what those divides were.
Americans today share the same feeling. A recent poll by Mother Jones magazine shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the nation may be more divided than at any time in its history.
The Vietnam era has been a touchstone for that divide. What public figures did during that time remains very important to the American public - John Kerry's record at war and in protest was debated nearly as much in the last election as his plans for America's future.
At UB, there are people all around campus who were here in the spring of 1970. They continue to be divided on how they remember that era.
"It was not a pleasant and happy time at all," said William Greiner. "In the short term there were a lot of bad feelings. The students today say, 'We wish we were there, it was so exciting.' And it was. But it was dangerous, and people treated each other badly."
But many students remember it well. "The really great thing about the UB experience for me is that there was no thinking person with whom you could not feel a certain degree of empathy about the condition, both in the university and the country," said Bob Culver. "Whether they were conservative or radical, you could engage them in a dialogue about what was happening."
Those dialogues - about war, violence, dissent, division and justice - have been renewed, as a new generation of students tries to understand its own war, and the people who were there in the spring of 1970 peer back through the looking glass.
