David Dawley ’63

Dartmouth College Oral History Program

Dartmouth Vietnam Project

April 28, 2016

Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

[ALEXA P.]

SONNENFELD:          All right, this is Alexa Sonnenfeld with David Dawley. We’re at the Rauner [Special Collections] Library. It is April 28th, a few minutes past 1 p.m., and we are beginning our interview for the Dartmouth Vietnam Project.

                                    So, David, can you tell me where you’re from and a little bit about growing up there?

DAWLEY:                   Sure. And as I thought about this, talking about Vietnam and my background, it’s sort of the fog of war meets the fog of aging. [Chuckles.] But I was born in Westminster, Massachusetts, a small town in central Massachusetts, about 1,200 people when I was growing up, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   My mother was born in Scotland. She was the baby of 11 kids. Her name is Dolly Ferguson [Dawley]. My father, Porter [W.] Dawley, was born in the house that he and we grew up  in in Westminster. And the background of both families really sets the foundation for the flip-flopping I did with regard to Vietnam. First I was for the war, then I was against the war. So I thought it might be useful, because it seemed relevant to me as I went through the process of deciding to be a conscientious objector, that the foundation has a long kind of military thread.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   My mother’s brother, Frank [Ferguson], Uncle Frank, was killed in World War I. Another brother, Percy Ferguson, was in the 10th Mountain Division in World War II and came home with a Purple Heart.

                                    On my father’s side, I’m a tenth-generation Hutchins, who—John Hutchins was an original settler and founder of Newbury, Mass., and came over with the woman that he married, Frances Alcock Hutchins, in about 1635. Four generations later, the family had moved to Haverhill [pronounced HAY-ver-uhl], Mass., and my four times great-grandfather, Jeremiah Hutchins, was in the Second Foot company in Haverhill, under Richard Saltonstall, who was thought to be a Minute Man and was definitely at [the Battle of] Bunker Hill for the American Revolution. And his daughter, my aunt, was there as well, Abigail [Hutchins], and she was pouring molten lead into bullets the night before the battle.

                                    After the war, Jeremiah Hutchins received land in New Hampshire and moved the family to Bath, New Hampshire, where essentially he was a founder. In the first town meeting, he was elected a selectman, so he roots run deep there. And he set up residence for the next several generations of Hutchins.

                                    And so there’s that strain of military history that certainly was relevant to my sense of patriotism,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —pride of country, sense of service, sense of duty. It was reinforced through my Uncle Mike, who was our very close next-door neighbor, who was a submarine commander in World War II—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and went under the nets of the Japanese and on the way out took the gold off Corregidor [in the Philippines], which was an important mission, and then sank some ships on the way back, so—

SONNENFELD:          So when did you—when did you learn that story with Mike or I’m wondering if we can take this back a little bit more to your childhood. What are some of the first memories you have, growing up?

DAWLEY:                   Right.

SONNENFELD: Aside—just beyond kind of the greater war picture.

DAWLEY:                   Well, they’re all relevant because I was born three months before [the attack on] Pearl Harbor.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   I got a ration book in my own name when I was two years old, so as I was growing up, I watched convoys of tanks and military equipment go through our town to Fort Devens [now Devens, Massachusetts], which was a big deal because it just kept going and going.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So I grew up with a big barn, lots of friends, but we dug foxholes in the back yard to kill Japs.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And, you know, there were other things. I had a Civil War musket and a Civil War hat from my neighbors, and I had another relative, Arthur Hutchins, whose name is at Rauner who died in the Civil War. But it was a happy, you know, outdoor, make-your-own-game childhood, reinforced by early television and by movies, initially, you know, dime movies, and we’d see newsreels about—about the war. But heroes became—you know, eventually John Wayne in, you know, [Sands of] Iwo Jima and The Fighting Seabees, things like that, early television in the ’50s. You know, a very famous series was Victory at Sea, which was documentaries each week showing naval battles, you know, so that—we were kind of immersed in that, growing up.

SONNENFELD:          Now, did you have any siblings?

DAWLEY:                   I did—an older brother, three years older.

SONNENFELD:          And how was that relationship? What was that like, growing up?

DAWLEY:                   It didn’t matter much when we were very young, you know?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Later, it was a pain in the ass.

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   But [chuckles], you know, he had his friends that he plays with because he was three years older, and I had mine, and sometimes people got together for pickup baseball games or, you know, football on the lawn or something like that.

SONNENFELD:          And how about school? What was your—what was your school experience like, growing up?

DAWLEY:                   Well, my first grade teacher was my next-door neighbor. And, again, it was—it was small-town New England. We—we all knew each other during school, after school, you know. And there’s always one or two people that, you know, you don’t like for some—one reason or another. But generally we—we all got along. Growing up was—

SONNENFELD:          And how did you—in school? Did you—did you like class? Were you not—were you particularly academic or otherwise?

DAWLEY:                   I was both. You know, class polls were “cutest,” “nicest eyes,” “smartest,” “most likely…” [Chuckles.] Those things.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   That was a—a thread. I mean, I was—I was the runt of the litter for my mother. She’d had—which I found out much later—two miscarriages and a stillborn daughter, so, you know, I came along when she was older, and my father was older, and obviously, you know, that was a special relationship.

SONNENFELD:          Sure.

                                    So kind of moving on from—from elementary school, unless there are some—some more specific moments you want to revisit—are—are there? No?

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          How about adolescence? What—what was that like? Can you kind of position us in your personal history, what was going on in the world and maybe how you started to feel and think about things?

DAWLEY:                   Well, again, we were always outdoors. In the winter, it was snowballs and skiing and—I studied very hard, and we had only nine grades of school in Westminster, so for sophomore year we went into the high school in Gardner, Massachusetts. I’d been in the Cub Scouts. I was in the Boy Scouts. I was a young Eagle Scout. So from a very young age, you know, going along with the movies and, you know, I had a war uniform and learned how to salute and take orders and give orders. That was all part of a—of—of growing up.

                                    And my family had a business that was making crackers right across the driveway, and so, you know, we were one of the more successful families in town, probably.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And so—so you mentioned you were in Scouts, as a Boy Scout and—and then as an Eagle Scout. Can you expand a little bit on what that was like and how you think that may have affected your interests and—and hobbies at the time?

DAWLEY:                   Well, again, I grew up skiing, so we used to take day trips—you know, this was when there were rope tows, and then when rope tows became j-bars and other kinds of lifts, and so we were always mooning for those—on weekends, and not everybody could do that.

                                   Refresh me on your question again.

SONNENFELD:          Sure. Just can you walk me through a little bit what it was like being a scout at that time?

DAWLEY:                   Oh. Right. Okay. Well, I always wanted the next rank, so I was in—I was always in search of merit badges and doing that stuff and wanting to be the youngest Eagle Scout ever and that kind of—youngest and the first in the town. But in summers I—I went to camp for two months on Lake Winnipesauke in Winter Harbor, near Wolfeboro [New Hampshire], and, you know, we slept on platform tents, military tents, washed in the lake, carried water from the lake to drink and do all that—loved it. Went hiking in the mountains of New Hampshire—you know, Osceola, Tecumseh, Mount Washington, Mount Lafayette—you know, Chocorua. And so that—those were the summers.

                                    And, you know, the rest of the year was—was a combination of studying and whatever sports kind of rolled with the—with the season.

SONNENFELD:          How about your relationship with—with the other Scouts or even with the Scout leaders? What was that like? Were they close friends, mentors? Were you at times ambivalent about the program or—

DAWLEY:                   No, I was never—

SONNENFELD:          —enjoyed it?

DAWLEY:                   —ambivalent. You know, what became a controversy a few years ago with scouts and gays was never—never even thought about when I was young—you know, all of that—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —many, many years later.  

SONNENFELD:          What was the—

DAWLEY:                   Just a normal life was to have Cub Scout meetings and then Boy Scout meetings, you know, every week.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And, you know, occasionally you go camping and to do things. It wasn’t any particular mentor out of that.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, I had good teachers in school. And the big break was when we went to Gardner High School as sophomores because we were—we were a heavily Finnish town, mostly Protestant. The Catholic church was built when I was 12 or 13, probably. And when we went to high school in Gardner [Massachusetts], we went into, you know, a small, successful industrial city that was a furniture manufacturing city. On the other side was Fitchburg [Massachusetts], which was a paper manufacturing town. Both those cities were very successful up until I was finished with college, before the chair industry went to North Carolina and the paper industry took off, and then both of those towns became ghost towns. But at the time, they were—they were very successful.

                                    But that was where, as sophomores, we met people that we hadn’t grown up with.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And they were Italians, Irish, Polish-Americans, you know, more Catholics than Protestant, a couple Jews. Gardner had a good reputation academically and a good reputation athletically, and we all got along. We didn’t have any problem. My best friends were, you know, [Richard J.] “Richie” Wolanski and Marcel [H.] Klavian, French-Canadian. And, you know, just all stripes, and nobody—nobody—nobody had a problem. There was a Polish-American country club, where, even before we were old enough to drink, we’d all go on Friday nights, and some would dance, and the rest of us would just kind of stand around and look around,—

SONNENFELD:          Would you dance at all, or were you—

DAWLEY:                   —grab a kielbasa.

SONNENFELD:          —more of a—

DAWLEY:                   Well, I’m short and small. I was then. So I didn’t jump up and dance, you know, as much, you know?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Tell—tell me a little bit more about—about your high school experience. Again, how—how were classes and—and friendships, and what moments stand out from high school?

DAWLEY: Friendships were—you know, considering everything that was going on in—in the United States not too many years ago, with ethnic conflicts and the issue of dropouts and terrible schools, Gardner was a good school. Smart students got along with students who weren’t as smart. Athletes got along with good students. Nobody really made fun of each other. We all supported each other. We competed in the classroom, just as we competed in sports, and so it was—it was—you know, had a time to cherish compared to times that came later, for most people. We were very fortunate.

                                    There wasn’t a history of many people going to Ivy League schools. One person a couple of classes before me went to Harvard [University], and I was the only one that went to an Ivy League school when we graduated.

SONNENFELD:          Were you applying to other Ivies, or—or why Dartmouth [College]?

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          How—how did you end up on Dartmouth?

DAWLEY:                   Well, Dartmouth was easy. I wanted to ski. And not compe-—I just wanted to ski.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   I grew up with skiing. I grew up with snow. My mother just always thought I should go to a small school, not a city school. There were no guidance teachers, you know. You kind of—I—it was the first year of early admission to Dartmouth, 1959 admission.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And I applied to Dartmouth and Williams [College] and that’s it, didn’t consider any other schools because nobody told me about any other schools. You know, you didn’t take trips to go see places.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   We had driven through Williamstown [Massachusetts] at one point because we used to take the old highway for an annual trip out to the University of Michigan, where my father went, so we, you know, did the big time, Big 10 [Conference]. I grew up with, you know, a block M on my sweater from the time that I was six. And so Michigan was really deep in my roots. You know, we had some family history there in terms of the pres- —the first Michigan alum as president of the—was born in Lisbon, New Hampshire, and he was a relative, so—

SONNENFELD:          But you didn’t apply to Michigan.

DAWLEY:                   No, didn’t give it a thought.

SONNENFELD:          Just—just knew you wanted to stay somewhere—and some more mountains?

DAWLEY:                   Well, they didn’t have—they didn’t have snow.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY: [Chuckles.]

SONNENFELD:          Sure.

DAWLEY:                   And there was no—

SONNENFELD:          And were your parents supportive of your—of your college decision of just applying to Williams and Dartmouth—

DAWLEY:                   They wanted me to—

SONNENFELD:          —and willing to support that financially, too, or—

DAWLEY: Absolutely. I mentioned that Gardner was a successful chair city. In fact, if you turn over the college chairs, you’ll see that those are Nichols & Stone. Well, that’s [Barbara] ‘Barbie” Nichols [Kirwood], my classmate, Carlton [D.] Nichols [Class of 1937], her father, who was a Dartmouth grad as well.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And then there were a couple of other Dartmouth people who wanted me to go to Dartmouth. [Charles C.] “Charlie” Brooks [Class of 1936] was—had a furniture company, and he actually—he brought me up to Dartmouth to meet with the dean of admissions, [Edward T.] “Eddie” Chamberlain [Jr., Class of 1936], I think. And put on my tweed jacket and necktie, and we had a nice conversation, and he asked me what position I was in class, and I was first, so that actually surprised the person who brought me there, Charlie Brooks. He said, “You were?” [Chuckles.] “You are?” So that was that. I applied for early admission, and—and got in, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Was there ever any thought about after col- —after high school, rather, going into the military directly, or you knew you wanted to have collegiate experience once you graduated?

DAWLEY: Nobody did that.

SONNENFELD: Nobody did that.

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Not right after high school. I say “nobody.” I can’t think of anybody who did it.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Okay. So tell me a little bit about getting to Dartmouth.

DAWLEY:                   You know, we got out of high school in 1959, so there was no war.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   You know, the Korean War was over.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And we were into the [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower years, so everybody liked “Ike” as a president and, of course, as a general. Grew up with the [Douglas] MacArthur hearings and [President Harry S.] Truman firing General MacArthur. And that was a big deal because, you know, one of the early things on television was to watch the ticker tape parades in New York, when MacArthur came back or, later, when astronauts came back. And those were dramatic, and that was all live television.

I remember my mother kept me out of school when Queen Elizabeth [II] was coronated [in 1952] because my mother—“I’m a Ferguson.”

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY:                   That was a big deal. You know, so that’s—that’s the backdrop. There was—there was no war. One or two may have—from high school—went into the service, but I don’t remember them going directly into the service.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. So tell me a little bit about arriving at Dartmouth as a college freshman. It’s the fall of ’59, right?

DAWLEY:                   Yes. Yeah. All male.

SONNENFELD:          All male.

DAWLEY:                   All male. The Choate dorms [sic; Choate Cluster] had just been built [chuckles], the ones that should be demolished now.

SONNENFELD:          I lived in them, myself, just a couple of years ago.

DAWLEY:                   We were the first in there.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   In those little concrete cells, called “suites.”

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   But it was a good location, as—all dorms are in good locations, but they had me walking to what today is ’53 Commons [sic; Class of 1953 Commons] was [there? 20:45] for—for dining—you know, past—past Beta [Theta Pi, now Beta Alpha Omega], the old Beta.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And as freshman, we were required to wear our beanies. You know, we had beanies that had our year.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And upperclassmen were entitled to ask us to do things if we had our beanies on, so did tasks. That was—from the college perspective—you know, community building exercise, which worked to a certain extent—anyway, I walked past Beta, and there were these two very huge men who called me over, you know, to do something for them. You know, in retrospect, I knew they were recruiting.

                                    So they said, “Why don’t you come down to the river?” You know, because I—one thing I—I wanted to get—I wanted to earn a letter, and I wasn’t going to do that playing football or something else, so they introduced me to crew as a coxswain, obviously. So I went down to the river. And, you know, later those two were my fraternity brothers. So right from the beginning, you know, we got to know each other as freshmen, but we had the interaction with upperclassmen, and that often led to affinity relationships of one kind or another, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —for me, that started out as crew.

SONNENFELD:          And then how was your experience with the crew team? Did you stick with it all four years, earn that letter, or—

DAWLEY:                   I did get my letter sophomore year.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY: Freshmen couldn’t row in varsity sports, so—in all sports, football and everything else—we had freshman teams,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and then you had varsity teams. And in crew, we had a big barge that people—for people to learn how to row? So for three weeks or something, they’d go down, and there’d be an aisle down the middle, and oars on both sides, and the coaches would do that. And then we got into the shells. That was easy, and that was natural for me, and—and I had an instinct for steering shells, which other coxswains did not have, because they were going all over the river. And I think from growing up in—with the Scout background and—you know, I—I just—as a small person, I had no problem getting in the face of larger people,—

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   —for whatever reason. But I also had a—I picked up very quickly a technical sense of what the coach wanted, and I was able to sit in the boat and act like a coach technically, in terms of, you know, what I saw happening and how that could reinforce what the coach was doing.

                                    So a couple of weeks after we were in those boats, the varsity coach asked me if I would cox the varsity boat because they needed a coxswain, so I ended up coxing the varsity during that fall, and freshman for races in the spring, and then varsity lightweight coxswain in—in my sophomore year, after which [W.] Hart Perry, a varsity coach, asked if I would coach the freshmen.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So I ended up coaching varsity—freshmen ’65s.

SONNENFELD:          Okay.

DAWLEY:                   And then—then I was elected president of the Dartmouth Rowing Club my senior year, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mmm! And how about—you mentioned—were you—were you a brother at Beta then?

DAWLEY:                   I was—yeah, I was a Beta sophomore year.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And I lived at Beta my junior year.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Can you expand on that experience a little bit?

DAWLEY: [Sighs.]

SONNENFELD:          How—how was—what was Greek life like at—at that time? I’m sure it’s—it’s much evolved now.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah. Beta was considered a jock house. We had most of the football team. The captains for several years were—you know, of championship teams under [Bob] Blackman—were—were heavily Beta. So it was definitely an athletic house, but there were—you know, it doesn’t—I mean—and they weren’t serious about studying.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, they were many a times. But parties at all the fraternities on big weekends were bringing in bands and, you know, having kegs of beer and—I really didn’t drink, so, you know, I went—I was at all the parties, but I didn’t drink much beer.

SONNENFELD:          What was the rationale behind that decision? Just—

DAWLEY:                   I didn’t like beer.

SONNENFELD:          —clear-headed for—

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          Just didn’t like it.

DAWLEY:                   No, it was—

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY:                   —pretty simple.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   I didn’t like it. I’d drink a cup every now and then, but I probably got drunk twice in four years.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. How about—as we said, Dartmouth was all male at the time.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah.

SONNENFELD:          How do you think that affected your education, and when did you interact with—with women?

DAWLEY:                   I don’t think that—we were happy as an all-male school,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —you know, going back. I’m very happy with coeducation, and I always was happy for the transition. It’s made the college better. It’s made men better, you know. But if we go back to those times, it was not unusual to have an all-male campus, you know, and, you know, we were happy. We liked it. Girls were brought in for the big weekends, or there were road trips to girls’ schools and all that stuff, and that was just part of normal, all-male Ivy college in those days, you know. Certainly didn’t show any great sensitivity or respect for most women [chuckles], but, on the other hand, there were—there were marriages that came out of people that were in the living room—you know, some that had grown up in high school and were bringing their high school girlfriends back to campus, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, at the end of senior year, I think it would have  been the unusual Dartmouth student wouldn’t want—would advocate coeducation.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And—and how about academics? What—what was your major, and—and how did you like it?

DAWLEY:                   Well, the standard for academics in general was a gentleman’s C.

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   You know? [Chuckles.] Of course, today that would be an A minus, you know, with all the inflation, right? [Both chuckle.] But it was—I think the—the idea was to have—well, first of all, you know, we were greeted by John Sloan Dickey [Class of 1929] as president, when he shook hands with us as we were coming in as freshmen. The message was, “Gentlemen, your business here is learning,” you know. Well, okay, so we learned, but it was really more broadly an experience of growing up and mixing and all the extracurricular activities and exploring and doing things and sort of ingesting the liberal arts environment and education and mindset. Some of the professors took that the same way. You know, some of them, who knew they had “gut” courses, were entertaining, and they were educating us in ways that weren’t strictly academic.

                                    “Herb” [Herbert F.] West in comp lit [comparative literature], for example, you know, I mean, he would get excited, and he would yell at the top of his booming voice, “Excelsior! Excelsior!”—you know. Or he’d tell a story about being on a bus with freshmen that went to a mixer at Smith [College] and stopping at a corn field, and everybody got off to piss on the side of the road, and the steam coming up. [Both chuckle.] You know, he’d create these images which just kind of reinforced what—what everybody was growing up with.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And—and what did you study?

DAWLEY:                   In today’s words, experiential education, because as—as a crew coach, that was full time.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   I—I recruited freshmen to crew when they came, and I had a hundred freshmen come out. We had to narrow that down to 16 or so, but certainly, you know, eight that were going to compete in the first boat, and that was intensive for me.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And that was the first year we had, in the old boat house, a tank that was a two-oar tank, one side, so only two could get in at one time over the winter, and so I had to schedule two people out of my freshman class to go down there. But I’d have to be there all afternoon to get rotating groups of 15—of two over 15 or 20 minutes, so that was—that was very intense.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   At the same time, I was on the Undergraduate Judiciary Committee, so the committee in those days was to—was to investigate and to adjudicate any issue that resulted in a report from the campus police.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And we had the authority to—to expel and to go up from a series of college warnings to probation, and so we—

SONNENFELD: What—what sort of acts did—tended to get prosecuted by that—by that committee?

DAWLEY:                   Well, the lower-level ones were, you know, caught in the dorm with a woman after hours.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, got caught dropping pants at some girls’ school, you know. Then there were—or driving a car when you’re not supposed to have a car on campus, to, you know, maybe fighting. There were—there were some serious ones that went to the upper end, but that was time consuming.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   We got free hamburgers in the basement of—of Robinson Hall on Tuesday nights, and a big night was the two-hamburger night. That’s when you go past midnight because you got a—but the time was investigating, you know, who did what and what—you know, were there witnesses, and on your own time you had to go around and—

SONNENFELD:          Was that something you—

DAWLEY:                   —come back with a recommendation—you know, present the case.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Was that something you volunteered for, or—or—or what was your interest in being part of that committee?

DAWLEY:                   I didn’t have much interest. Someone asked if they could nominate my name. Some—I think some people were ex officio, and then others were elected by the class, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm, sure.

DAWLEY:                   I turned out to be elected, so—

SONNENFELD:          And how about sort of world events or the news?

DAWLEY:                   Yeah.

SONNENFELD:          How—how aware of—of the greater world were you, and—and—and did you care, or was it sort of just a backdrop?

DAWLEY:                   Yeah. So it was ’59 to ’63.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And end of Eisenhower, with [President John F.] Kennedy coming in, so there was, you know, a set of students that had a certain romance about that. There was some racist stuff beginning. We had the King of the World come to campus. [Chuckles.] So that was the height of ridiculousness. There was not a strong sense of the campus as political.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   There were a few raging, right-wing conservatives, a couple raging Jewish leftists. Stuff would happen. We were, you know, a clean-cut generation, and so I wasn’t on the JC at the time, but there was trouble when a group took one long-haired guy across the river and cut his hair.

SONNENFELD:          Mmm.

DAWLEY:                   And that was across state lines, so it was a federal issue.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So you have those things.

SONNENFELD:          How about the Kennedy election? Did you vote?

DAWLEY: Probably. [Chuckles.] I—I just wasn’t—I wasn’t too absorbed in that.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   What scared the crap out of all of us was the world about to explode in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And, you know, so that was really an impending moment of doom. People very nervous and, you know, graduating into that, or what was going to happen. You know, happily that got settled, but that was—that was happening our senior year. I think it was maybe October of ’62 or something like that.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And was that something that students would kind of discuss regularly, or—

DAWLEY:                   Oh, it all came and went, actually, pretty fast, you know.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Right.

DAWLEY:                   A couple of weeks, probably.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Later, much later, in 1970 I was on the National Advisory Council of the Peace Corps [sic; Peace Corps National Advisory Council], and with a well-known Chicago journalist, [Charles L.] “Charlie” Bartlett. I discovered later that he’s—he had introduced Jack and Jackie Kennedy [Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis] to each other, and so had a relationship with Jack before going into the White House with Jack and [Robert F.] “Bobby” [Kennedy] and the Kennedys. And they used him to send a secret message to the Russians at the moment when they were looking at options to try to resolve the situation. And I thought, Hmm, that’s interesting.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   So that came out later.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   But I thought that was—you know, that was a time when it starts to come up to the Vietnam period in the sense that many people were—were in ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] and Naval OCS [Office Candidate School of the U.S. Navy]. I was in ROTC freshman year only. We can go back to that, but—so, you know, the—those who had graduated a couple of years before me and my class that was graduating, it was ROTC and OCS—went in without facing war.

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY:                   And, you know, suddenly they’re into Vietnam. You know.

SONNENFELD:          So what attract-—

DAWLEY:                   But ROTC freshman year was just sort of a Mickey Mouse kind of deal. But the person in charge was a man named [William R.] “Sarge” Brown, who was highly decorated, highest-rank master sergeant in the [U.S.] Army or whatever. You know, gruff but very lovable. A nice guy. It was a privilege to know him. And he started—went to mountaineering for ROTC, which was very popular. It was one of the first colleges in the country to have an ROTC winter mountaineering course.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And Sarge Brown became very famous and later was brought out by [Peter W.] “Pete” Seibert, who founded Vail [Ski Resort], and Sarge Brown became the mountain manager and invented grooming equipment and trading in his Jeep for a Lamborghini [made by Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.]—

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   —by the time everything was over.

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY:                   So he—ROTC was Sarge Brown, you know.

SONNENFELD:          And what attracted you to ROTC in the first place?

DAWLEY:                   I don’t—who knows? I’d been a Boy Scout. As I said, you know, I knew how to salute and wear a uniform, and I don’t remember why I signed up. I didn’t find it very interesting, so I dropped out.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Again, there was nothing in the world that was making the decision to go in or to get out—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —at the time.

SONNENFELD:          Sure. So you’re kind of—let’s—let’s go to the point of graduation.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah.

SONNENFELD:          What are kind of your—your thoughts, your anxieties? How are you feeling upon graduating at Dartmouth?

DAWLEY:                   Oh, I was living in C&G [Casque and Gauntlet] at the time. We were a pretty diverse group of people. And I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. The Peace Corps had started, you know, a year earlier, basically. But I had no idea. You know, there was nobody to provide any help for how to evaluate career choices. I didn’t want to be a lawyer because I grew up watching Perry Mason on TV, trial  lawyer. I said, I can’t talk like Perry Mason, so I can’t be a lawyer because that’s what lawyers do, right?

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY: Nobody told me, “Well, they do some other things too.” And then I thought about business, so I went to a couple interviews of companies coming through town, and one was with Proctor & Gamble, and they gave me this long form to fill out that had the strangest questions that you can ever imagine. And I said, I have no interest in this.

                                    And so that was late in my senior year, when I ended up listening to a dean from Yale who came up and talked about Peace Corps. And I decided I’d do that for adventure and to learn Spanish,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —not out of any ro- —a noble purpose of helping people. You know, that sort of comes once you’re immersed, you know?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Things change, but—so about 13 in my class that went into the Peace Corps.

SONNENFELD:          Wow.

DAWLEY:                   It was a high—high number.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And, you know, so that was that.

SONNENFELD:          So once you graduated, did you go straight to your Peace Corps assignment, or did you have the summer for—

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          —the summer off?

DAWLEY:                   Again, this was early Peace Corps, so they were figuring things out.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   We had training in the United States, and now all training is out of the country and closer to the culture that you’re going to be immersed in. Latin Amer- —I was invited to go to Honduras, to train for Honduras. You’re not a Peace Corps volunteer until you come out the other end and they accept you after training.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, until then you’re a trainee. And they had two training sites for Latin America. One was Puerto Rico, and the other was New Mexico, and I went off to New Mexico. And that involved about eight weeks living at the University of New Mexico with eight hours of Spanish a day and a number of required courses: American history, you know, communism, those things. A collection of learning skills, like putting on a roof or killing a chicken, skinning a cow—you know [chuckles], really—you know—

SONNENFELD:          So they taught you—

DAWLEY:                   Things you will never use.

SONNENFELD:          —those sorts of things at the university.

DAWLEY:                   At the university. That was part of it.

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh. Wow.

DAWLEY:                   You know, they contracted things out. We had basically outdoor—what’s the program called? Outdoor—

SONNENFELD: Outdoor Education?

DAWLEY:                   Well, yeah.

SONNENFELD:          NOLS [National Outdoor Leadership School] or something like that?

DAWLEY:                   Yeah, similar to NOLS, whatever, from Maine. Anyway, so we—we did that. We had, you know, running every morning before breakfast and playing soccer and eventually hiking, rappelling down the wall of the football stadium and then doing that from the cliffs outside Albuquerque.

SONNENFELD:          What was the composition of the students like?

DAWLEY:                   Those things, I loved.

                                    It was a range. There was a friend from Cornell [University], one from Harvard. There were four or five people that ended up going with our group of 35 to Honduras, who were over 50. You know, several women. Some with farm backgrounds, you know?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Four or five of us who were—were pretty healthy and outdoors, so we—you know, we liked all the outdoor stuff and climbing and hiking and all that stuff.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   But after eight weeks, in Albuquerque and you’re also going through all kinds of psychological profiles and put you into T-groups [training group], sensitivity training groups that, you know, put you under the microscope to see how you’re going to be, and various people would get selected out. Okay, you know, we go home.

                                    Our next step was to go to Taos, New Mexico, for four weeks or so for specific community development training, and a couple of things happened as we got to Taos. One was that there was a gulpe de Estado, a coup d’etat, in Honduras, in which the military took over the government in anticipation of a result from the election that was not going to be what they wanted, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —they—and the U.S. put diplomatic relationships on hold and actually broke diplomatic relationships with Honduras while we were coming through training.

                                    And then John Kennedy was killed when we were in Taos, and so that was—that was interesting.

                                    We were extended an extra couple of weeks before a decision was made to go to Honduras, and the Peace Corps—the Peace Corps always emphasized—the story of Peace Corps was a People to People [International] program and not a government program. You know, it was, in a larger sense, the era of The Ugly American, a book that was famous at the time—you know, the American was a bull in a china shop, going through different cultures and different places, and we were going to be the answer to that.

                                    And so when we went to Honduras, we kind of underscored that idea of People to People, because there was no embassy in Honduras at the time.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   We were, you know, the first people to come after the assassination of the president, so I think that’s when some of us began to see things different, through the eyes of the people that we were meeting, because, I mean, I certainly hadn’t embraced John Kennedy and all the romance sur- —surrounding—I was from Massachusetts, so, you know. The Catholic Kennedys was not the most popular family in non-Catholic Massachusetts, and Old Man [Joseph P.] “Joe” Kennedy, you know, got the reputation—

                                    But suddenly we were greeted like we were personal representatives of the Kennedys, and you’d go out into the village where you were going to live, and you’d see pictures of Jesus and then Virgin Mary and John Kennedy, and, you know, go to—if you go into a whore house, you’d see pictures of John Kennedy along with, you know, the Virgin Mary if you were—

                                    So, I mean, that was the—that was instructional for—for most of us to see, begin to see our own country through their eyes.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And—and—and tell me more about your experience in the Peace Corps. What—what—what did your day-to-day in Honduras end up looking like, and what are the relationships and—and moments that—that stand out?

DAWLEY:                   Well, the first one to stand out is going to my town, El Triunfo de Choluteca in Honduras, in southern Honduras, tropical Honduras, and pulling up in a Jeep and meeting the mayor of the town and was—a woman in her 70s with a long braid down—down her back, and Miña María Huete [archivist note: spelling uncertain] and basically getting rolled out of the Jeep. “See ya later.” Didn’t have a place to stay, didn’t have a place to eat. [Chuckles.] Somebody had gone there and said, “Do you want a Peace Corps volunteer?” And, “Sure,” you know. “What’s a Peace Corps volunteer?” “An American.” “Okay, we’ll take one.”

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY: Suddenly, I—there I am, you know, so me and María set up a cot and put me in the Catholic church. The priest came once a month, so the church was empty. And that’s where I slept for the first week or two weeks. I can’t remember exactly what, you know. That was a pretty brutal kind of [chuckles] moment.

                                    And when the priest came, he made sure he found me a place where I could live [chuckles], not in the church. On the other hand, we were going to have a working relationship together because one of the things I was doing was supporting Catholic radio skills, which—they broadcast literacy programs and public health programs out into the—into the hills.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So I ended up in a—in a house with some people that became sort of my Honduran parents, I guess. They cleaned out tack rooms, about eight by twelve brick room, Spanish tile, no—no ceiling, just this—the tiles and an opening to the courtyard, about seven feet up. Put in a bed with a string—and a straw mat, and I put down my Boy Scout mattress, and that was—that was my room for two years.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Next to the kitchen, so rats were running through the ceiling every night and screaming. You get used to it.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   No running water. They had a well. So—

SONNENFELD:          And what were—what—what was the nature of your work there?

DAWLEY:                   The work was community development, and the whole idea was to get a sense for what’s needed in the town, what the people wanted, and then to go about the process of organizing and mobilizing people in ways in which they could try to come together over something that they agreed was—was needed for the town. So, you know, there was a—there was a lot of what the early Green Berets [U.S. Army Special Forces] did. So you move in, and you establish relationships. You listen, and you talk, and you get a relationship, and then you work on things. You try to empower people. There was no tradition of that in Honduras. It was a paternalistic society, you know, so they’re used to being told what to do—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and not taking responsibility for themselves, and leadership in a town was something that was dangerous because as political parties changed, leaders in small towns got killed or, you know, disappeared. So there’s that process.

                                    So I’m—I’m—had guidance from the people that I was living with, and most of my time was spent in the town during the week, and then on Saturdays I’d go out into the aldeas [villages] on a mule to connect with—through the Catholic radio schools, meet another group of people, where the idea would be to try to make something happen.

                                    So in town, eventually it was clear they didn’t have medical services, and I spent a lot of time in rocking chairs, on porches, drinking warm Pepsis and, you know, just talking to people and making sure that I knew people, sort of all political factions involving restarting a soccer team that the town had.

                                    But we—when it was clear that getting medical services was important, we actually started a—a survey/petition and went door to door, and a couple people from town that was kind of leading it. And that kind of grew into the idea that, “Well, let’s ask the government to send a nurse” and then “send a doctor,” so we got the nurse there, and then over time, the idea was to—to build a clinic, so we ended up doing that.

                                    I had one of my Peace Corps colleagues, who’s an architect—he came down and made a simple design, and we went through the process of a lot of self-help. Got the town to give a plot of land. We got—had dances for—every once in a while, or something else, as a raffle to raise some money so that people were engaged. And then we went to the national government and asked them for support in terms of roofing tile. We started the construction, and you know, eventually I ended up serving the very—the poorest of the poor, you know?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. So—so you enjoyed the work, or—

DAWLEY:                   Yeah, it was—

SONNENFELD:          —did you ever—

DAWLEY:                   —well, it was hard.

SONNENFELD:          —did you ever feel homesick?

DAWLEY:                   I wasn’t homesick. It was just, you know, this is a place where, you know, the non-rainy months, the candles actually droop at noon? You know, they just kind of fall over, it was that hot and sweltering?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So you didn’t have any relief from that. And it was, you know, dusty in the summer, and rats running around every night, you know? And I—in my room I had a hammock that went across the room, most across, and at night the rats—I was—I was reading, and a rat stopped right above me and pissed on me. [Both chuckle.] And I said, “Wait a minute!” You know, “You’re supposed to stay up there, and I’m down here,” so we declared war.

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   You know, and then—you know, the food was pretty greasy, and, you know, nothing really nutritious. It was a big deal for me to go on kind of a two-hour trip, depending on whether we could cross the rivers in a bus to the nearest city and go in the market and get a banana and some rolls and have a banana sandwich with rolls. You know, that was sort of a big deal.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So we did—we got—we got a doctor there eventually, and—and in the hills it was a matter of building up what today would be called microfinance, but they started as credit unions and then, you know, find a way in which people can collectively save 25 cents, 50 cents a month and make some loans to each other to buy some fertilizer or to get some medicine. And we built that up and connected to the national movement for cooperativas and started--started three cooperatives: two outside the town and one inside the town.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   But basically the health clinic and all the credibility that was coming from that was the process of developing leadership which could then go on and solve other problems, so following the clinic and after I left, they developed a public market and did some other things, so I’m kind of—continued to work out.

                                    I was also taken away for a couple of periods to go to the north Caribbean coast—I mean, the Peace Corps office asked me to create an Olympic-style track and field event for primary schools.

SONNENFELD:          Mmm.

DAWLEY:                   So I sent home for books [chuckles]—how to do track and field. [Chuckles.] That’s how I used Michigan. The Michigan track coach had a book that my father sent me. And that was a much different experience. That was something that had to be done over a short period of time, and so I was in kind of a position as a general. I worked in coordination with a national social agency, but I was the boss,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and I had to make it happen, and there was no tradition. It was the first track meet in Honduras. It was the first interscholastic meet in Honduras. It was going to be the first organized sporting event in which girls participated. So we had to, in the end, you know, create the track with string and got a national stadium and got some help from United Fruit [Company] and got some help from the army, went around to the various schools, walked down the beach to schools and helped them understand what the events were going to be, and they became very creative. They created weights out of cross-sections of palm trees and—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —we did high jumps or hurdles by holding sticks for each other and came together and had a great day. I had 300—we had 300 competitors. Went on all day and it was very successful. It was a national event. It was covered.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So that was something that was different but very satisfying.

SONNENFELD:          And during your time with the Peace Corps, over those two years, how aware were you of, again, global events—

DAWLEY:                   Right.

SONNENFELD:          —that were going on, and what—what was your take on that?

DAWLEY:                   This is what gets interesting because, you know, in my town, if we wanted to get a message out, it was by the telegraph operator. You know, you think of the old Western movies, and it was Morse code, and he’d send it out and whatever. So the only other thing you heard was through shortwave radio, and Peace Corps. The second source of information was the free subscription they gave us to TIME magazine. So the buildup to Vietnam for me was through TIME magazine and through shortwave radio, the Voice of America, both with extreme points of view.

TIME magazine was under Henry [R.] Luce, and he was—he was known for rewriting reporters’ stories that they sent him from Vietnam: David Halberstam, [Theodore H.] “Teddy” White. I mean, it all came out later. I mean, they were—just were very frustrated that Luce would impose his own pro-war view of what we were getting in our magazines.

                                    And the same thing with the Voice of America. So I was in that room, really counting the—the dead Viet Cong every night. You know, how many did we kill today? And—you know.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And that was—that was how I experienced the war. And, of course, having grown up with that tradition I had, I was—my patriotism and my loyalty was to—was not to challenge my country. I was just beginning to appreciate, in general, what I—what became very strong as—as I traveled after Peace Corps, was the differentiation that Hondurans and people in other countries made between Americans and our government.

SONNENFELD:          Mmm.

DAWLEY:                   They liked Americans; they didn’t like the government. And paradoxically, they didn’t hold us responsible for the government. So that was an observation that for me was reinforced when I spent time in Cuba, when I went to Thailand, when I went to Malaysia. It was sort of the same thing, and it took a while for me to appreciate that a lot of people felt this way.

                                    So Vietnam was—that was another layer to the Vietnam experience, I think. By—by the time my service finished—in general, I wanted to study more about what I had been doing. I’d been reading a lot of anthropology—Oscar Lewis, about families in Mexico that he’d studied, and I was also very interested in guerilla warfare, fascinated by [Ernesto] “Ché” Guevara  and what he wrote, by “Lawrence of Arabia” [T. E. Lawrence], and the movie came out while I was in the Peace Corps. But I also read Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his book, which had a lot of theory on guerilla warfare. And I was reading about the British in Malaysia.

                                    And so these layers of thoughts were in my mind. I still kind of had a militaristic instinct at a personal level, and I thought, with everything I was hearing about the war from the Voice of America, that, you know, I should volunteer. You know, My classmates are over there. I’m not gonna run from the war, and I should volunteer. It was a great sense of, you know, who were the best fighters? The Green Berets. And the early Green Berets—they’re not like today’s. You know, they—they would go into the villages and stay and develop relationships and organize and all that, do stuff.

                                    You know, so that’s who I would want to be. I always thought I was probably too small for that. But at the end of Peace Corps, I definitely planned to travel for two or three months through South America. But our director was an Annapolis [U.S. Naval Academy] graduate and former number two on a nuclear submarine,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —you know, which had more nuclear power than the atomic bombs that had gone off from World War II. They could blow the world apart. And so I was—I was applying to social work schools to study applied sociology, basically, or thinking about enlisting.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And his advice to me was to go to graduate school, and if the war was still there, to decide later. So that’s what I did.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, I traveled, and then I went to Michigan and started there, and—

SONNENFELD:          And—and—and how about your brother? Let’s take a moment to pause. What—what was he doing at this time, and—and was he considering joining the—the military as well, or—

DAWLEY:                   No, he and I didn’t have a close relationship, so—

SONNENFELD:          No.

DAWLEY:                   —he was completely irrelevant to anything that I was going to decide to do. [Chuckles.]

‘SONNENFELD:         Uh-huh, sure.

DAWLEY:                   Totally irrelevant.

SONNENFELD:          Sure.

DAWLEY:                   And it was all—you know, I was sending some letters back and forth with classmates who were in different parts of the world and sort of had some views from—from their side, but I was deciding. But I took that advice from—from [Joseph A.] “Joe” Farrell [III] and decided to go to Michigan. And they had a program starting in January. I was out in October, I guess, so I ran down to Portillo [Chile] to go skiing and did some other stuff.

                                    But Michigan was not only where Kennedy first talked about Peace Corps, but it was the home of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, and it’s where [Thomas E.] “Tom” Hayden (Jane Fonda’s husband for a period of time) and [R.] Alan Haber developed the Port Huron Document [sic; Port Huron Statement] and started SDS. And Haber—when I went there, he was then in the Ph.D. program and not an activist at all.

There were several of us in the Kennedy organization component of the School of Social Work, and we were clearly activists. Michigan grad school was known, like [University of California,,] Berkeley, as an activist place, as opposed to Colombia [University], where at—the undergraduate school was activist, but the graduate schools were considered more conservative. So we had a core of Jewish leftist activists at Michigan as my friends.

SONNENFELD:          And how’d you come—

DAWLEY:                   So I was still very pro-war when I went to Michigan.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   And—but that—that was servicing as a—as a public conversation by then—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —among students, and people were taking positions. And one of my classmates introduced me to I. F. Stone’s Weekly, independent investigative, now famous journalist, who published a weekly newsletter, and she saw that I got a subscription to that. And what was interesting was that he was really—he wasn’t writing personally as an advocate with a view about the war; he was using government documents to show the lies about the war.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And it was through I. F. Stone’s Weekly that I came to oppose the war.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. Were these conversations you had with your mom and dad at all when you—when you kind of started to shift, or were they sort of oblivious?

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   No, there weren’t family conversations.

                                    Well, at Michigan I—I organized classmates to protest a racial eviction of one of our classmates, and that led to a successful conclusion. We took busloads of people to the guy’s home on Sundays, and eventually he confessed that it was racial.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And we did some undercover work for discrimination in bars and discrimination in housing. And then—there’s a connection here, but it’s not immediately obvious, but James [H.] Meredith was the first black to be enrolled at the University of Mississippi, and he was enrolled with federal troops.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   He decided to have a march from Memphis [Tennessee] to Jackson [Mississippi], and the civil rights organizations did not want him to do that. The Southern Christian Leadership [Conference], SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]—none of them wanted him to do that.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So he started off by himself, with a couple other people, on the march. And a couple days into the march, he was shot by a white man in bushes. He wasn’t killed, but he was shot. It’s the kind of event that sort of rallies people to support what they didn’t support.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And—

SONNENFELD:          In—in what year is this?

DAWLEY:                   That was June of 1968.

SONNENFELD:          Sixty-eight.

DAWLEY:                   It was called the march Against Fear, or “the Meredith March.” And there wasn’t a loud call, but there was a call for some volunteers to go down, so a few of my classmates and I decided we—we’d take some people and go down to support the continuation of the march, which civil rights organizers now were going to do. You can’t shoot—

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY:                   —a black man without us coming together, even though we thought that he shouldn’t do it. So we—we had some people give us training to go down there. My name was in the newspaper, and I got a 2 a.m. telephone call threatening bad things if I took people down there. We went anyway and joined the march in Belzoni, Mississippi, or just before Belzoni, and we marched into Belzoni down Mississippi Highway, and it was all black and white together, “We Shall Overcome,” you know, people singing. And SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee under Stokely Carmichael was registering voters along the way.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And [the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther] King [Jr.] was there, Carmichael was there, and we got to Greenwood, Mississippi, and, again at night, you’d sleep in tents, and there was a militant black group called Deacons for [Defense and] Justice that would have rifles, and they’d go around the perimeter, defense. But at night there were traditional civil rights kind of church rallies, and everybody singing and doing all that stuff. Everything was friendly. People were coming out, and they were holding hands.

                                    Then on an afternoon in Greenwood, Mississippi, a small town, from a porch, a guy named Willie Ricks got up and asked the crowd what they wanted, and they said, “Freedom Now! Freedom Now!”—you know, which was what everybody was saying. And he said, “No, you don’t. You want—you want Black Power.” And he started telling them why they should have Black Power—you know, politics, economics and those kind of things.

                                    And he’d stop, and he’d ask them again, “What do you want?” And, you know, eventually it went from “Freedom Now!” and a mix of “Black Power” to just kind of this crescendo of everyone answering, “Black Power! Black Power!” And just sort of you felt the hair on your arms just kind of go up if you were white.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And then that night, Stokely Carmichael, who had been in jail in the afternoon, came back, and he picked up the theme. And that changed the march, but it was also literally the turning point of—from the Freedom Now! movement to the Black Power movement. And—and Black Power moved like a tornado to the urban North. Martin Luther King tried to organize in Chicago, and basically he was run out of town.

                                    And there’s—I’ll just jump out of sequence because—there was a definitive history of civil rights called Eyes on the Prize, which was a television series on PBS [Public Broadcasting System], which took the civil rights up to 1965—you know, it was just incredible. And then they decided to do a second series, and that was going to be from ’65 on up.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   I got in touch with them because I had been doing things in Chicago as an organizer with a street gang, and I thought that they should be aware of what we’d done to include that. And instead, some time later, I got a call, and they wanted to talk to me about having been there when Black Power came off that transition. And I was the only white witness they could find that had been there when Black Power first came out.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And the reason they wanted to do that was that they had a theory that that was the time Black Power—not only were whites kind of told to organize whites and blacks would organize with blacks, and whites basically would stay out of the movement, but they felt that the whites who were active in civil rights at that point then became active against the war, so they wanted somebody to kind of testify to that kind of transition. Which I did. So that was a civil rights movement that had something of an impact to the mobilization against the war.

SONNENFELD:          And—and what was your thinking at the time, when—when you were witnessing that transition?

DAWLEY:                   My thinking was that—

SONNENFELD: Where’d you fall?

DAWLEY:                   —it was time to go back to Michigan [chuckles], you know, and take final exams.

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY: [Chuckles.] We weren’t going to hang around. The mood in the camp changed right away.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And I just—it was—and it was time to go. [Chuckles.] So we went.

SONNENFELD:          And what was the duration of your time at Michigan like? And—and—

DAWLEY:                   Well, it was—it was activist again. I was also a lobbyist for the Michigan State Association of Social Workers that had a field placement, but they’d never had a lobbyist before, so I was a lobbyist, and I worked with a woman who was a chairman—chairwoman, and so every week, I’d go up to work out of a senator’s office, and we were monitoring legislation, trying to block legislation. We actually passed some legislation. And we worked out of the office of a man named Coleman [A.] Young, who later became mayor of Detroit [Michigan]. And my boss was Maryann Mahaffey, who later became chairman [sic; president] of the Detroit City Council.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, so that was an intense, time-consuming activity.

SONNENFELD:          And as the war continued to unfold and while you’re—over the course of grad school, how did your thinking about the war change?

DAWLEY:                   You know, we had—well, I was against the war. I showed in any Ann Arbor demonstration, and I went with my roommate to New York for the big New York demonstration, a march  from Central Park to the United Nations. And then in 1968, I went to Washington [D.C.] for the mobilization there at the Pentagon.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And in Washington, you know, a friend of mine, who had worked with—in Washington—he knew the McNamaras. He knew Kathy McNamara [Kathleen McNamara Spears]—the Secretary of Defense and his daughter, and so we had the demonstration at the Pentagon. And then a couple of nights later, I went with Suzie, whose father was an adviser to [President] Lyndon [B.] Johnson and had been president of NBC [National Broadcasting Company], so there were—we went to have dinner with [Robert S.] McNamara and his wife and three or four other people, and that was kind of bizarre.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah. Tell me—tell me about that.

DAWLEY:                   Well, he was—he was just quietly entertaining. You know, he was interested in talking about social issues and not war issues and not the politics particularly, so he was—he was presiding over his views of education and he was kind of arrogant and dismissing the demonstration. He said, “Well, you know, if—if—what they should have done was to just lie down, and then we couldn’t have done anything.” [Chuckles.] Just everybody lie down.

SONNENFELD:          And—and did you disclose that you had been a part of the—

DAWLEY:                   Oh, yeah.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   His daughter was at that point—his daughter was working for Bobby Kennedy. She wasn’t there because she was campaigning for Bobby Kennedy before he was assassinated. You know, [Edward M.] “Teddy” Kennedy’s legislative assistant was there with his wife or his date. So there was a mix. He was just—it was bizarre.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   I mean, that—you know, eventually one of the things that I saw both with McNamara and the with the war, and both, thanks to David Halberstam, is how much you could understand about what happened in someone’s past or in past history.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So with McNamara, David Halberstam wrote the book, The Reckoning, which is all about his time at Ford Motor Company as CEO [chief executive officer].

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY:                   And what you could clearly see was that at Ford, he was—he was a technocrat, and he demanded—he wanted numbers, and he evaluated by numbers. But he wanted you to give him the numbers that he wanted.

SONNENFELD:          Mmm.

DAWLEY:                   And that’s what he did as Secretary of Defense as well, like [William C.] Westmoreland—you know, “Give me the numbers that I want. How many did we kill? Just show me how well we’re doing.”

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And Halberstam did it again with a recent book called The Coldest Winter [sic; The Coldest War; America and the Korean War], which is about the war in Korea, where if you want to understand the military in Vietnam, you actually could read the book on Korea, and a lot of the mistakes that in Vietnam were actually just so clear in the Korean War.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So—patterns.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   Past as prologue.

SONNENFELD:          Sure. So you graduate from the graduate school in Michigan with a degree in applied sociology?

DAWLEY:                   It was a Master of Social Work—

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY:                   —in community organization.

SONNENFELD:          And—and what was your plan from there?

DAWLEY:                   I wanted to work for Warren [W.] Wiggins. Warren Wiggins wrote the paper that was the—became the organizational plan for the Peace Corps. [R.] Sargent Shriver didn’t really know how—how he was going to organize the Peace Corps and whether it should be small, whether it should be large, in the government or part of an agency and all those kind of things. And Warren Wiggins and a man named [William] “Bill” Josephson, a lawyer. Wiggins was working in sort of the predecessor of USAID. They wrote a paper called “The Towering Task” and made multiple copies, and they got it to Shriver late at night, and Shriver read it, woke everybody up and said, “We’ve gotta have a meeting.” That was the beginning of it.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And from there, Wiggins became essentially the chief operating officer of the Peace Corps and became a legend. And he was starting a private company, which was hopefully to be a way for former Peace Corps volunteers to be active on social issues in the United States but be able to pay the rent,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —have the beginning of a career path. And I just wanted to work for him. His first contract was a research contract to look at programs in 11 cities, summer programs, and what was happening and were they going to be successful, because at that point we have riots in the streets and people were worried about having a cool summer, and so there was a focus on youth and whatever. And I had no interest in research, but I wanted to work for him, so I took a position,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and I became a team leader for—for that.

SONNENFELD:          And where was that based?

DAWLEY:                   Well, it was supposed to be east St. Louis [Missouri], but I had been to Chicago for a visit with an older cousin, who took me around the city, and I really liked Chicago. Went to all the private clubs and public clubs, and Playboy [Club], and listened to jazz and listened to John [W.] Coltrane. I just—so I managed to trade with a person who was in Chicago, and I went there instead of east St. Louis.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And tell me more about—about that work and—and what you got up to in Chicago.

DAWLEY:                   Well, that’s a long story. I guess to an extent it’s in a book that I ended up writing, called A Nation of Lords: The Autobiography of the Vice Lords. In asking around, I had to focus on a couple neighborhoods to do the research we were doing, and one of the neighborhoods was the West Side of Chicago, and everyone told me that the Vice Lords run the West Side of Chicago, and that it was, you know, a violent place.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And I thought I should meet them. So I asked a couple people if they could help me meet the Vice Lords. One of them got back to the FBI very quickly, who got to Wiggins and said, “What’s your guy doing there?” But the other said, “If you want to meet the Vice Lords, come out to” a theater where there was going to be a rally to raise money for poor people in Mississippi, “and somebody will tap you on the shoulder.” And that was the beginning of meeting a street gang named the Vice Lords, which was several thousand people on the West Side of Chicago—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and the beginning of investing myself for a couple of years in some ideas for making change.

SONNENFELD:          Making change in what sense?

DAWLEY:                   I spent a summer with them, and I began to see that there had been so much violence in their lives, they’d seen so many people shot and killed, so many people in prison that they wanted to see something different for the young people who were wanting to be like them. They didn’t really know how to do that.

                                   Nobody would believe that the Vice Lords wanted—could change. There—there were some business leaders that were having meetings and created the impression that they wanted to provide some support, but what I felt was that they were trying to buy a cool summer.

                                    At any rate, I had moved into that neighborhood because, like the Peace Corps, I wanted to live among the people that I wanted to work with.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Again, I also had—the early Green Berets did the same thing, so I sort of had that—

SONNENFELD:          And what was kind of the stereotypical profile of the Vice Lords, and what was the demographic makeup, if you could just fill out the picture a little more.

DAWLEY:                   All black.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Most had been in prison for violent crimes,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —aggravated assault and murder. A lot of 14- to 17-year-olds that would hang on street corners every day as Vice Lords, and the older ones—you know, there had been a riot over the—you had the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965, and in ’66, ’67 there were riots in Detroit and in Newark [New Jersey] and other cities, so cities were in flames, basically,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —in several places, and people were really worried about this kind of confrontation. The Kerner Commission came out after—after riots and saying, “We’re moving toward two societies, one black, one white.” Well, you know, that was the West Side of Chicago, and, you know, all the young kids looked up to the older people that they’d grown up with, and they saw, and they just—they identified—if you asked them what they were, they’d say they were Vice Lords or something.

SONNENFELD:          And how did they respond to you being there?

DAWLEY:                   Well, they—I mean, I—in Peace Corps I had developed some skills, how to move into a situation in which I was conspicuous, and with a very different culture. And, you know, I knew how to be comfortable in that kind of situation, so I moved in, and I was just—I stayed there day and night. I went to the pool room that the Vice Lords owned and shot pool with them and stayed on the stoops at night and went to places with them. So the idea that I might be an FBI plant or something like that over time—you know, they came to know that I was not a plant and they weren’t fearful of that. And then I—they were—responded to my observations about how I thought some of the businessmen were just trying to buy off a cool summer.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, they weren’t—and they wanted one thing, and businessmen were playing a different game,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and the police were as well. But I came to feel that they—they wanted to make some change—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and do some things, and eventually I—I had some ideas for how to make that happen, so—

SONNENFELD:          Sure. So that was just for the summer, then or for—

DAWLEY:                   That was for the summer.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   But I went back with the idea of developing some ideas and—and that I would return to Chicago on my own.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And one of the things I—well, one of the things that came out of our report was that there should be—there should be year-round programs, not just summer programs, that young people should be involved in the programs, they should be involved in planning as well as—and I learned from a friend in Washington that an officer at the Rockefeller Foundation could authorize up to a certain amount of money without going to full committees—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and all that stuff. And so I took recommendations from our report about planning—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and involving young people and thought, okay, we would go for $15,000, today a $30,000 grant, to—to the Vice Lords Incorporated and start thinking about how we could organize the—their desire to do something different and to have an impact.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So I took that, went back to Chicago, and I said—drove in at two o’clock in the morning, went to the pool room and said, “I’m back.” They didn’t believe that. Found a place for me to stay. And we eventually—I said, “There’s a choice here. Here are a couple of my ideas. See what you think. We can write a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for six months, maybe, to get a planning grant to decide how we can take this force that the Vice Lords have and begin to do something constructive and positive, and create something different for the young people, and direct them away from jail to something legitimate. Do you guys want to write something, and I can give you some advice about it, or do you want me to write it?”

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   Well, of course, they wanted me to write it.

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.] Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   So I wrote a proposal, but I wrote it kind of from the voice of the street,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —a lot of kind of street language, but clarity and specificity with regard to where we wanted to go. Eventually, Rockefeller Foundation, Dr. Joseph [E.] Black, got back to us and said—said, “He’s interested.” He said, “But I think you need more money.” So he used his resources to persuade a group of businesses in something called Operation Bootstrap to match what he was going to give.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And that became the launching pad for—for now getting paid to organize some programs and to try to—try to build—so over two years, we did some pretty interesting things, got a lot of headlines.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   You know, we opened a restaurant, we opened—we used the Black Power, which had come out of the South, as Black Pride, and Black Is Beautiful, and took all the positive elements of that to open a boutique for African-American jewelry and clothing. We eventually manufactured some clothing, some that was on The Johnny Carson Show [sic; The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson] and a black comedian host.

                                    We worked with the Institute [sic; Museum] of Contemporary Art to open a street program called Art and Soul, where kids could come in off the street and do stuff, but there was a black artist-in-residence, and it was a gallery space, and, you know, we did tenants rights, organizing. We opened a small restaurant. We did joint ventures with a couple of other folks. We opened Tasty-Freez franchises. So we did a mix of—of hopeful small businesses with kind of service programs and got a lot of—

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   —positive press. We—we grew grass. Where there was glass, there will be grass, between the sidewalk and the street, which was usually covered with broken bottles and all that kind of stuff. We actually planted grass. The grass grew with just a little string protecting it.

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY:                   If anybody thought about stepping over, they’d get knocked down. I mean, people knew that right away. It was Vice Lords grass. You know, walk to the corner. No shortcuts. And the national network news, Walter [L.] Cronkite’s [Jr.’s] show came—Walter Cronkite’s [CBS] Nightly News came out and filmed it and—you know, big deal, we grew some grass. But it was—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —that was so different.

SONNENFELD:          Now, again, to—to relate this experience to kind of what’s going on in the world,—

DAWLEY:                   Right.

SONNENFELD:          —again, your pulse on sort of the situation and—and how that continued to develop and your thoughts in relation to it.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah. The relevance is in different ways. What was going on in the world was us, as far as the country was concerned.

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY: [Chuckles.] You know, riots. [Chuckles.] There was a convention the Democrats had in ’68, and, you know, the FBI wanted to know what the Vice Lords were going to do. I—we had an FBI agent, a black one, who came out and talked to us openly from time to time. The night before—well, Martin Luther King was assassinated, to start with. The Vice—we were scheduled to have a press conference the next day to announce the opening of our restaurant, and the FBI called. I happened to pick up the phone because it was late at night, and we were sitting in the darkened place that we were opening the next day, and the Vice Lords chief was there, and Fonzo, John Halsey is on the phone. He wants to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and so I tell him, “We’re not going to start anything, but if something starts, t hen, you know, we’ll be in the streets.” So that was useful information for them.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And the next day, you know, April 5th, 1968, Chicago had a huge riot, and basically Mayor [Richard J.] Daley didn’t call off school. We let out the school kids, and it was the 14-, 15-, 16-year-old school kids that started going to the streets, and eventually windows broken, and flames and Vice Lords went to the streets as well.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And then gave out food afterwards. So that was going on, the Democratic Convention, and I—I was in the background as far as—as much as I could be. Tried to be invisible to—to the Chicago media, but I had visibility through Peace Corps. I was on the cover of—the only publicity that I would take would be Peace Corps or something that the Vice Lords wouldn’t have—I was on the cover of a 25,000 volunteer home—at home. This is applying experience at home, so that gave—and the Esquire did a thing on
“[One of the] 27 People Worth Saving [in the World],” so—

                                    And that led to, in 1970, an appointment by President [Richard M.] Nixon to the National Advisory Council of Peace Corps. Neil [A.] Armstrong was the chair. It was the first thing he did when he came back from the moon.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY: Normally, it was the vice president, but the vice president was in disgrace at the time. That was Spiro [T.] Agnew.

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY:                   Nixon was president. So—

SONNENFELD:          And what were the objectives of the committee?

DAWLEY:                   It was congressionally mandated, so Nixon had to appoint somebody, and it’s ceremonial. You give people a presidential appointment. Neil—Neil took—took the Council seriously, so we actually did a couple things. But because that was Neil Armstrong, he was just back from the moon, we had State—a State Department [U.S. Department of State] reception, you know, with the Secretary of State, and we had coffee in the Cabinet Room [of the White House] with Henry [A.] Kissinger,—

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   —and then with Nixon.

SONNENFELD:          Wow. That’s high-level access.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah. But with coffee—you know, Kissinger made his own harmless, general remarks, and then he asked for questions. I had a question. Most people did not. And my question was, “Well, you know, with Vietnam going on, what advice would you give to a senior who’s graduating from college and considering the Peace Corps?” And, you know, he was—you know, gave a—a pro-Peace Corps kind of answer, but then he went on to say about Vietnam—he just started talking about the bombing in Cambodia and how he hadn’t—he didn’t have any idea that there was going to be bombing in Cambodia. And there’s Neil Armstrong, sitting there, and Kissinger is lying his ass off, you know. [Chuckles.] He can lie to me.—that’s easy—and all the other people around the table, but you’re lying to Neil Armstrong, that’s not a good thing to do. It was totally unnecessary, but he did it.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So that was—

SONNENFELD:          So that was unprompted, after being asked about, “What would you tell to high school senior if they were thinking about”—

DAWLEY: College.

SONNENFELD:          Or college senior.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah, exactly.

SONNENFELD:          Huh.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah, yeah. 

SONNENFELD:          And—but nobody in the—

DAWLEY:                   But he was—

SONNENFELD:          —did anyone in the room follow that up with any more pressing, or—

DAWLEY:                   No.

SONNENFELD:          —just—

DAWLEY:                   No, it wasn’t—

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   You know, it wasn’t—wasn’t an inquisitional meeting; it was coffee and just ceremonial, for the most part.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   But he dropped that, and it did not escape my ears, anyway.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And then—and that’s the way he was known. My fraternity brother, Mike [Michael W.] Coffield, Class of ’62, several years later did a two-hour deposition of Kissinger in Kissinger’s office. And Mike was representing Seymour [M.] Hersh. Seymour Hersh was the journalist who blew open the Mỹ Lai Massacre.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   This deposition was for later. It was for the bombing of a Korean airliner, and Hersh felt that that was—the U.S. was more involved than [chuckles] anyone thought, that it was CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] or somebody wanting to observe the response time of the Russians, who blew the airliner out of the sky—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —and that there was—so there was a subversive kind of attitude to it. So—and Mike said, you know, at one point—you know, he was asking Kissinger something that he didn’t have to answer, and if he answered, he would be in violation of a federal law, and Kissinger answered, and he knew that Mike would know that it was a lie, but he didn't care, and he just flat out lied to him in a deposition.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   And—and that was Kissinger. When I lived in Hanover [New Hampshire] in the mid-’80s, a friend from my having worked in Massachusetts was then president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and he came up and stayed overnight. And, you know, he talked about Kissinger and how people—you know, nobody trusted him, and everybody thought he was just not a—not a—he was brilliant but flawed.

SONNENFELD: Certainly.

DAWLEY:                   So those were—all those conversations happened because I was able to do something in Chicago that got me to those positions where I could see and hear what’s going on.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

                                    And so now it sounds like we’re sort of tracing chronology again, early ’70s. At this point, what are your career goals, and what direction are you thinking of taking your life?

DAWLEY:                   Hmm.

SONNENFELD:          Any thoughts of settling down at this point?

DAWLEY:                   Well, yes, no. You know, I was in Chicago. I decided to move on from the Vice Lords. I was thinking about staying in Chicago. At that point, I was living with a woman I had met on a ski vacation in—in Aspen [Colorado]. And I knew people in Chicago, and they knew me, but my coming out of the Vice Lords was something that was too uncomfortable—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —for some of them. So there really wasn’t anything that I was going to find in Chicago. And I decided to move back to Massachusetts. And in that process, a friend introduced me to somebody, and I ended up getting a position in state government, which I then eventually leveraged into working for the governor, so—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And what attracted you to—to that line of work?

DAWLEY:                   A paycheck.

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY: [Chuckles.] No, a paycheck. You know, initially I was hired as an advocate for the poor under an Office of Economic Opportunity grant to the state, and nothing could be more bureaucratic or boring than a very large, open, sterile room. But I did something that I learned in Chicago. In Chicago, I was very privileged to be invited a couple of times to a monthly dinner that a group of very wealthy Jewish businessmen had, to discuss a book that they would have read for that dinner. [Robert A.] “Bob” Pritzker—he [the Pritzker family] owned the Hyatt Hotels and Pan American [World] Airlines and things at the time. Just a number of, you know, others.

                                    And—I’ve forgotten what we were talking about.

SONNENFELD:          Just kind of we’re in early ‘70s. You’re working for Mass. government.

DAWLEY:                   Yeah. Oh, well, I really liked that experience. It was very—very intimate and, you know, reading and being together. So I—I—from that, I took the idea of, Okay, there are a bunch of young people working in this big state office. Why don’t we have brown bag lunches and we’ll invite senior policy makers from state government?

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So we did that, we invited several, and then we got the governor’s chief policy adviser, and he was talking about stuff, and at that point, one of the big problem cities was New Bedford, Massachusetts. You know, it was always kind of a—a little bit of a rough place, and a fishing place. Summers were nervous. I had—I had the idea of, “Why don’t you open a governor’s office in New Bedford? You know, like an outpost office, that kind of thing.” And I wrote that up in response to what he talked about at lunch. And he liked the idea.

                                    And then I had the idea to build on that, because I had a salary from the federal government. I said, “Okay, what if I can bring my salary to the governor’s office? Would you have a desk?” [Chuckles.] He said, “Yeah, I have a desk.” You know, free salary and all that stuff. So I ended up upstairs in the—in the statehouse, working for him.

                                    And from that, I did some things that were useful to him, so I went downstairs, right outside the governor’s door and became sort of a palace guard for the chief secretary and was able to do a few interesting things from—from that position. So it wasn’t a career path; it was just sort of a winding road with a couple of ideas that got me to an interesting place in state government.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah. And so where are we in the chronology at this point? What—what’s the year?

DAWLEY:                   Well, that was—I would say it was 1970 to 1973, something like that.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   The governor was up for election. He was a very progressive Republican governor in a Democratic state, but Massachusetts had had that tradition with [Edward W.] “Ed” Brooke [III] as a black senator and Elliot [L.] Richardson, who was a cousin of [Francis W.] “Frank” Sargent, my governor. And my governor had stopped the interstate from going through and had worked with [Barnett] “Barney” Frank and Kevin [H.] White and all the people that were in—from different angles of similar issues and working together. So—you know, so all that was going on.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm. And—and still—you know, I know that you mentioned you were a conscientious objector, earlier in the interview—

DAWLEY:                   Oh, yeah.

SONNENFELD:          —but at this point, are you concerned about the draft, or—

DAWLEY:                   Yeah, well,—no, the conscie- —going back to Michigan,—

SONNENFELD:          Uh-huh.

DAWLEY:                   —when I graduated. In ’67, I decided—it’s a good point—I was not going to run. I wasn’t going to hide. I was going to confront the draft. Muhammad Ali had already done that. so I applied as a conscientious objector, knowing that they could not accept my application. I was not a pacifist, and they could not approve anything that relied on a particular war theory. You couldn’t object to a particular war and be declared a conscientious objector, you know.

                                    So in my application, I, you know, wrote in all the religious stuff that they wanted—you know, the values growing up, and I had the Boy Scout church medal and all this kind of stuff and exaggerated religious arguments that weren’t really important in my real life. But I did that anyway, knowing that it was going to be rejected. So that’s number one.

                                   Number two, draft boards were autonomous, so you were very much dependent on your—your own draft board, so somebody in middle America—you know, really pro war all the way—maybe you were anonymous to the draft board—you know, they could do whatever they wanted with you.

SONNENFELD:          Right.

DAWLEY:                   There was a fellow Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras. During training, he fell off a horse. He stupidly tried to grab a concrete post, and he broke both his legs, and he went back to South Dakota, and he had a knock on the door and both legs in casts, and he said he loved that he opened the door and the draft board was wanting to grab him, you know.

SONNENFELD: [Chuckles.]

DAWLEY:                   So that wasn’t going to happen where I was in Massachusetts, a small town, small high school. I was known. I thought, Put all those things together and maybe then do some things. Also I was—I was not going to be exposed very long. When I graduated, I was—what?—a few months away from turning 26.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And although you’re technically eligible until you’re 35, if you turn 26, basically they’re not going to draft you. There were no—there was no lottery at the time. So I was technically exposed, but in reality I wasn’t,—

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   —because they—they really wanted 20-, 21-, 22-year-olds. They didn’t—you know, they didn’t really want to draft 25-year-olds. But I—

SONNENFELD:          Yeah. How did you watch the war develop, then, domestically? And—and—and it sounds like you started to kind of move not into politics, but you held a position close to political office. Obviously, more domestic oriented, but just curious on your perspective from that position, as—as the war progressed and as America’s sentiment began to shift.

DAWLEY: Frankly, that’s all kind of vague after the demonstration in Washington.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   You know, it was—it was hot but winding down in certain ways. I think the Paris Accord [sic; Paris Peace Accords] was ’73 or something, and, you know, I was in the governor’s office at ’70. We were all against the war. I mean, at different levels in the government, most people were against the war.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And—I mean, my—I guess I came back to [sic] the war more in the ‘80s, when I moved to Washington and I ended up working in Cassidy & Associates, which is the largest lobbying company in D.C.

SONNENFELD:          And what attracted you to that position?

DAWLEY:                   Oh, well, I had been working at Dartmouth, and kind of against the grain, while working in the development office with a good boss, I developed an idea for how to fund a Thayer School [of Engineering] expansion, from a new source of funds, an idea that I got from a friend in D.C., former Peace Corps volunteer. And that was to have a direct federal appropriation.

                                    Some senior people thought I should shut up and stay out of that game, but I had been asked to think about how you fund basically a doubling in size of Thayer School and Thayer School didn’t have an idea of how to do that. They thought it was going to be $7.5 million of corporate money, and there were all kinds of reasons why that was not going to happen back then. And so I thought we should go after a federal appropriation, and I thought we should hire a lobbying firm.

                                    Well, it got to the point where—at least where, over the initial resistance of the provost, [David T.] McLaughlin and [Paul D.] Paganucci decided to—that we should ask or seek the counsel of Senator [Warren B.] Rudman. So I went to Washington with the assistant dean, [unintelligible] and somebody else—I can’t remember if it was—who it was at the time. And Rudman had already done something for UNH [University of New Hampshire], and he said, “I’ll do it. You don’t have to hire a lobbying firm. I’ll do it.”

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   So I became the point man for Dartmouth, and [Thomas] “Tom” Polgar became his point man, and we ended up in a year or so getting a $15 million grant. It was about $35 [million] in today’s dollars. It was the largest grant in the history of the college.

                                    That experience led to [Gerald] “Gerry” Cassidy asking, when I moved to Washington, asking if I wanted to help develop some business and earn a commission, and that was very generous, and so I ended up doing that. Again, one experience led to another. And after a period of time, got an office there as a consultant.

                                    There were two people there—and by then, my book had come out on Chicago, and all that’s important in my own mind, but one day in the corridor, one of the senior members of the firm said, “David, come in and close the door.” And he was a Cornell [University Class of] ’63, as I was a Dartmouth ’63.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And he started to tell me about his experience as a [U.S.] Army Ranger in Vietnam. And the reason he did was because he respected my experience in Chicago.

SONNENFELD:          Hmm.

DAWLEY:                   And he had—he had been captured by the Viet Cong, and he escaped. But, you know, he was telling me about—as Rangers, they’d go up in trees and have to count the number of North Vietnamese coming down trails [chuckles] underneath them.

SONNENFELD:          Wow.

DAWLEY:                   And that there were monkeys up in the tree, throwing bananas at them. [Chuckles.] You know, after they stay there all night. Well, he was captured, and one of the things he knew was that after three days, the VC were going to turn him over to the North Vietnamese, and if they did that, he was gone, he was screwed. And they had him—they had him tied to a tree, and somehow he got his hands loose, and one night they were asleep except for one guard, and he was hoping that the guard’s rifle was not on safety. He managed to get loose, took the guard’s rifle, shot him, shot the others, sliced off a couple of ears because that’s what the—what the Vietnamese would be doing, and he wanted to leave a message: You know, “You got some crazy people you’re messin’ with, you know, so think about it.”

                                    And he started working his way back to the American troops. He came up on a U.S. sentry and just put something to the guy’s head and made him say something about the [Boston] Red Sox—you know, to know who was who—

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   —and escaped. So he was—he was kind of screwed up, but I always felt some guilt about not being in Vietnam, and I was—you know, somebody like Arthur had made clear that we had some things in common in terms of experience and he respected that. That was also with [Paul X.] “P. X.” Kelley, who was a four-star general and commandant of the [U.S.] Marine Corps, and he—he also was on the floor at Cassidy at that time. He read the book, and the next day he said, “You mean you really lived with those guys? You’re crazy.” [Both chuckle.] So he was P. X., and that sort of felt—it felt good to have those people as friends and not having any conflict with them because I didn’t go to Vietnam.

SONNENFELD:          Sure. Sure.

DAWLEY: There’s always a certain amount of guilt when you don’t go and see people coming back.

SONNENFELD:          And, yeah, did that guilt—I was going to inquire—did that guilt stem from knowing friends who went that didn’t, or from your family’s military background, or what was the source of that guilt?

DAWLEY:                   It was the whole thing. I mean, you grow up, and you’re supposed to be patriotic and do all that stuff. Well, I had worked myself through—you know, that was—that was  fine, but it’s more patriotic to stand up for what I believe and act out my values and, you know, to take positions. I wasn’t running from anything.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   In fact, I even brought a—[He apparently unfolds a paper document.]—I actually brought a quote from Colin [L.] Powell. Someplace. Somewhere in my notes. I’ll just read it. Because in a film made about the new Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky, Colin Powell says, “I wouldn’t call him a draft dodger. He stood up and said, ‘This is something I cannot do, and I will take whatever consequences from that decision.’ I admire that in a man.” And that was Colin Powell.

SONNENFELD:          Mm-hm.

DAWLEY:                   And, you know, with those kind of things, it sort of helps someone feel better when you didn’t go and your friends did.

SONNENFELD:          Yeah.

DAWLEY:                   So.

SONNENFELD:          Well, great. I think that’s a great stopping point for us, David, so I’m going to turn off the recorder for now. Thank you very much. It has been a pleasure to listen.

[End of interview.]