C. Thomas Long ’65

Dartmouth College Oral History Program

Dartmouth Vietnam Project

May 17, 2016

Transcribed by Mim Eisenberg/WordCraft

[ELLEN P.] 

LI:                                This is Ellen [P.] Li in Rauner Special Collections Library. It is May 17th, 2016, and I’m speaking with [C.] Thomas Long, who is calling from Great Falls, Virginia. Could you begin by telling me where you were born and what your parents’ names are—were?

LONG:                        Sure. My—my proper name, by the way, in—in all of the college record is going to be Charles Thomas Long. I used the middle because my dad’s name was Charles, and he got to pick, and so I’ve always used the middle. I was born and raised in—in Lakewood, Colorado, just outside of Denver, and—and my parents were Charles Long and Jessie Elizabeth Long.

LI:                                And what did they do for a living?

LONG:                        My dad was with IBM [International Business Machines Corporation]. He was what was then called a customer engineer. He was high school educated. He grew up in—in West Virginia and then moved to New York and, as he put it, was the seventh man Old Man Watson [IBM founder Thomas J. Watson Sr.] hired when he still used the packing crates for a desk in a warehouse on the East Side of New York, before IBM was called IBM. And he worked for IBM for almost 50 years.

                                    My mom was born in—in the Badlands outside of Deadwood, South Dakota, and moved to Washington [D.C.] in the early 1930s and got a law degree at what is today Catholic University [of America]. It was then just the Columbus School of Law, while she was working for Joseph [P.] Kennedy [Sr.], who was one of the first commissioners of the SEC [U.S. Security and Exchange Commission]. So Mom was a lawyer, and Dad was sort of a self-trained, on-the-job-trained engineer with IBM.

LI:                                And how did their career paths, I guess, impact you as you were growing up, if at all.

LONG: [Chuckles.] Well, they did. I was a math major at Dartmouth because I could count to twelve without taking my shoes off in 1957, when the Soviets put Sputnik [1] into orbit, and if you didn’t do something scientific or mathematical at that point, you were somehow unpatriotic. And so growing up around IBM and—and—and in the era even before they were making computers, when they were making “business machines,” I think had an impact on that.

                                    And after a couple of summers—and I spent the summer I guess after my sophomore year trying to develop a mathematical model for the water flow under the Los Angeles basin for [the U.S.] Geological Survey in Denver, essentially sequestered in—in a closet-sized room with mountains of data that had been collected for years from wells that they had dug in—in the ground in Los Angeles to measure the water level. Nobody really knew much about how water flowed underground at that point, and the fellow who was in charge of the Geological Survey office in Denver was really interested in that and—and so gave me this pile of data and asked me to develop mathematical models for it.

                                    And I decided at that point that I really didn’t want to spend the rest of my life locked in a closet with piles of dusty paper and that maybe law, which seemed to involve the same sort of analytical thinking and—and so on but lets you talk to people would be more interesting. And—and so I was in [U.S.] Navy ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] and kind of thought I would probably spend my career in the Navy because I was always fascinated with it, but failing that would—would go to law school.

                                    And so I took what today is called the LSAT [Law School Admission Test] when a bunch of my other friends did, because Mom was a lawyer, and wound up being accepted at Stanford [University] and Harvard [University] and—and had figured—I wasn’t sure I was going to get commissioned because your eyes had to be 20/20 to get a Navy commission in those days, and—and my eyes were borderline. And so I wasn’t sure. So I went ahead and applied to the law schools as kind of a safety for not getting into the Navy.

                                    I then did get my commission, and so I wrote to the two law schools and asked them to keep my records on file, thinking I would go to Stanford, being a westerner and having come east for my undergraduate education. And—and to my real irritation and disappointment, I got back a form letter from Stanford that basically said, “We don’t keep people’s records on file. You’ll have to reapply.” And I got a handwritten note from the dean of the Harvard Law School that said, “You don’t need to reapply. Just drop me a postcard, and we’ll have a place for you in the class anytime you want to come.”

                                    And so I never looked back at Stanford. I went on active duty with the Navy and, clumsy—and broke my leg jumping from a boat to a landing because I didn’t want to wade through the water. I had a date to go hear [Ludwig van] Beethoven’s Third Symphony [Symphony No. 3] at Monte Carlo [Monaco] with—with one of Princess Grace’s [Grace P. Kelly’s] social secretaries. My ship was home ported on the south—south coast of France. And I didn’t want my shoes and suit all wet, so I jumped to the—to the landing, and my leg snapped when I hit the ground, and I had a double compound fracture in it, which then took nine months to heal. They had to operate on my leg and put it in a cast for nine months.

                                    And they weren’t going to let me go back to sea after that. My roommate on the ship had applied for command of a Swift Boat, but we were on a guided missile cruiser that was the flagship of the [U.S.] 6th Fleet. And I thought Swift Boats sounded really neat, and I wanted to do that, too, but they weren’t going to let me go to sea on anything, at least for a long time.

                                    And so I got out of the Navy and went to Harvard Law School, so ultimately wound up following in—in my mother’s shoes, a very long—long way around to get to it.

LI:                                Wow. Certainly. So I guess something you said earlier was really interesting. You mentioned that growing up, there was an emphasis on science and how that was tied to patriotism.

LONG:                        Mm-hm.

LI:                                Could you speak a little more about that and I guess also how aware you were of national news stories at the time when you were growing up?

LONG:                        Yeah. we didn’t have a television set until—I guess until about my—when I was in junior high. My next-door neighbor had a TV set, so I used to go over and watch stuff on their TV. But used to listen to radio a lot. But was—was aware, between newspapers and the radio and whatnot, of—of—of news. And, yeah, in—in 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, all of a sudden the United States went into a panic because we had been very secure behind our safe oceans for decades—you know, fearing only invasions by Mexico and Canada, which we didn’t fear a whole lot. And—and all of a sudden, the Russians have put a satellite into space and—and had access to an atomic bomb—and that had been in the news, too—and—and so everybody was really worried that we were losing what was known as the “space race.”

                                    And—and you had to help the country out if you had—had a scintilla of ability in the scientific areas. And so [the U.S.] Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, which provided scholarships for anybody who studied science. And—and actually—and I may have the details wrong on this, but I think you either had a forbearance—you clearly didn’t have to pay any of it back while you were in school, and if you taught afterwards in a scientific field, you didn’t either, and you didn’t have to pay while you were in the military or working for the government. And so it really was a federal subsidy for scientific education, and—and that was—that was a big boost for anybody that was interested in it.

                                    And my high school in Jefferson County, Colorado—I was really lucky. I had a—a very good high school, and, for a bunch of odd reasons, I was able to take advantage of it. I did—I did three years of Latin and then—and then my girlfriend started studying Russian, and I decided that was a neat thing to do, so I—I started doing Russian during the summer before my senior year and did two years of Russian in high school and then continued that at Dartmouth.

                                    And—and they did an accelerated science program, in which they—accelerated math courses, so we—we took I guess Algebra 2 in our freshman year—I may get these backwards—trig[onometry] and solid [geometry]—and it was Algebra 2 in our sophomore year, trig and solid in—in the junior year, and then my year of calculus in—in our senior year.

                                    And they also offered a course to a handful of students from all of the schools in the county, which meant one night a week, which they called, romantically, astrogeophysics because the theory behind this class was—it was a general science class, but it was at the senior level, and the idea was that scientists were becoming too narrowly focused and that by being aware of other disciplines, one would see solutions to problems in your own area.

                                    And so, for example, they had [theoretical physicist and cosmologist] George Gamow [pronounced gah-MAW] come down from University of Colorado on—we met one night a week, and—and Gamow came down for a couple of weeks and taught cosmology. They had people come up from the [U.S.] Air Force Academy and—and over from the University of Denver to teach this general science class one night a week. And then—and then every day during the regular class day we had a study hall, which we were to use in the library, doing research on whatever the current topic in this class was.

                                    And so I was kind of shoveled into [chuckles] the sciences, starting in ninth grade, because of the conduct of the Russians. And—and, yeah, I was—I was aware. And shortly after the Soviets launched Sputnik, we tried to launch—the Navy tried to launch the Vanguard [rocket], and—and characteristically, the United States—it was done on a Friday night and televised, and we did have a television set then, and I remember sitting in my dad’s living room with him, watching it as the—as the Navy rocket rose a few feet off—off the launch pad, burst into flames, exploded and—and crashed without being able to get off.

                                    And I, and I think everybody [chuckles] who watched that thought, We’re really in trouble now. We—we don’t seem to be able to do the stuff the Russians are. And that all sort of piled up to—to influence where I went.

LI:                                Wow. Interesting. So in addition to the I guess educational response of the United States in terms of its panic manifesting, did you experience any other tangible signs or pick up on any other cultural evidence of that kind of anxiety in the ‘50s while you were growing up?

LONG:                        Sure. I mean, the whole—watching film clips in school, atomic bomb tests that everybody has now seen, [unintelligible; 12:56] the house that implodes and the mushroom clouds and that kind of stuff. And practicing air raid drills where initially you would just get down under your desk and cover your head, and then later they decided that way wasn’t safe enough, so you’d move into the hall [chuckles] and again get down and put your head next to lockers in the hall so the atomic bomb wouldn’t hurt you when it went off. So there was a lot of that kind of stuff.

                           Involvement with the government and the military was much more common in—obviously, coming out of the Second World War and then with Korea [the Korean War]—lots of headlines about what was going on in Korea in 1950, ’51, ’52. And so the military was a more obvious presence in our culture than it has been since Vietnam, since the draft was abolished. You know, the military has kind of gone back to the way it was before the Second World War, where the military goes off on bases and is—is one percent of the population and the rest of the people sort of know they’re out there and are glad they are but—but may not know anybody who’s in the military and may not know anything about it.

                                    That was not at all the case in—in the ‘50s and ’60s, where it was—it was much more common. I’ve—I’ve heard different numbers, but—but our class commissioned about 30 people in Navy ROTC and between Army, Navy and Air Force, it was almost a quarter of our class, I think, went in—you know, was in ROTC during—during our time at Dartmouth, because that’s just what a lot of people did.

                                    I had an uncle who was in the Navy during the Second World War. I think that’s why I was—when he came back, I heard lots of stories from him about the South Pacific, and it was all pretty romantic. He didn’t tell horror stories. And I thought that—that was pretty neat. And I think that’s probably my connection to the Navy, Colorado being a long ways from any body of water bigger than a bathtub.

                                    But the military was a much more visible presence in—in our life in those days than it has been since.

LI:                                And with all the threat of atomic bombs, did you ever feel unsafe on any sort of real visceral level?

LONG:                        I was never sort of really scared that the Russians were about to blow us up, but there was always an awareness and a concern that—that the next war would be—would be a very quick one, and we were vulnerable in it, and it was really different than the United States had ever experienced before. And I think—I think everybody sort of understood that and—and reacted to it one way or another.

                                    I mean, I don’t ever remember, you know, we being [chuckles] afraid. There was no sort of disabling fear or quivering in a corner kind of thing, but—but, yeah, it was—it was an everyday presence that—that caused real concern.

LI:                                And do you think there are any parallels between that and the fear of terrorism now?

LONG: Absolutely, absolutely. I think, again, of sort of like watching the Vanguard rocket go up and come down and explode. I was in—in this room, my office in the basement. When I retired from practicing law, I moved my desk and my bookshelves and everything else into the basement at home, which is the office I work in most of the time. And I have a television down here, and I had it on and watched the—the second plane hit the Twin Towers [1 World Trade Center and 2 World Trade Center] on 9/11 [2001]. And—and I think—I think the vulnerability—

                                    My wife and I travel a lot. As I said, we take a class to France at least every—every year and—and actually we’re taking a group of [chuckles] 30 folks from—from my Dartmouth class, who found out about [unintelligible; 17:45]. We’re leaving in nine days to do that. And we’ve traveled a lot, and I remember distinctly we went up to New York over the holidays a few years ago on a train. And—and you go through all of this extensive security getting into the airport, and we—and we dragged our great big suitcases onto the train and piled them in the—in the front of the car and sat down. And nobody said boo. And we looked at each other and said, “Holy cow, this is really bizarre.” If you wanted to do something awful, you’d, you know, blow up a train in the Holland Tunnel [connecting New York and New Jersey beneath the Hudson River] or something like that.

                                    And so, yeah, we have—it—it doesn’t scare us. My next-door neighbor is—is worried. [Mitchie? 18:30] gets nervous every time we go to Europe and—and every time somebody sets a bomb off in Brussels [Belgium] or Paris [France], she gets more nervous. And I—I think a lot about the people we know over there and—and worry about them, but I think the vulnerability to that kind of attack is every bit as real as the vulnerability to a Soviet attack was during—during the Cold War.

                                    And, yeah, living—the North American Air Defense Command [now the North American Aerospace Defense Command] was headquartered in Colorado Springs, and—and there were a lot of military establishments around Denver, which seems like kind of an odd place, but—but we were sort of aware of—of being in a—in a target zone in—in those days.

                                    And interestingly, when—when we took our—our class to France this spring, none of the students nor any of their parents raised any question about it, despite, you know, the bombings in Brussels and Paris. And—and I thought about that a little bit, and it was—it was interesting because the—the tour managers that do the bookings and that kind of stuff for us were sending out all sorts of alerts [unintelligible; 1:48] alerts.

                                    But—but [chuckles] the fact is that when your classroom is—you know, is 600 yards from the White House, which mine was—you know, it’s just west of—of the White House in downtown Washington, you’re—you’re probably as much at risk, you know, walking to and from class as you would be, certainly, in Normandy [France] and probably in Paris.

                                    And so, you know, there is—there is a sensitivity and [chuckles]—it’s been several years ago now; it must have been 2011. I was in Colorado right after the 9/11—we were there for a high school reunion, the only one I’ve ever gone to, and—the 50th reunion, and—and we were sitting at brunch in a—in a restaurant, nothing—sort of like a Denny’s or something like that. And I saw this woman pull up in a car and get out of her car and start looking for stuff in—around the parking lot. And she was going through trash bins, and she was looking around signs and doing all sorts of weird stuff.

                                    And coming from Washington, where they had sort of been drumming, “If you see something, say something” into us, I watched her for a long time. And she finally went over to—to the large sign that was the signage for the—the shopping center and reached up on top of the sign and—and pulled something out and did something with it, and then put something back in that place, got in her car and drove away.

                                    And I watched that, and I said, I don’t know what that person is doing, but—but that’s really odd behavior, and so I called the local sheriff’s office. This is in Lakewood. And—and they thanked me. Asked me if I got the driver’s license, the license plate, which I didn’t. Stupid. But [chuckles] they—they sort of came and checked to see what was going on and—and indeed, using security cameras and whatnot, identified the woman, saw what she had been doing, and they called me back six hours later, thanked me for—for calling them, encouraged me to do it again, and asked me if I had ever heard of geocaching.

                                    And [chuckles] I said, “No, I don’t know what geocaching is.” And [chuckles] they said, “Well, it’s kind of a—something like  a scavenger hunt, where you get clues and you go out and look for stuff. And that’s what that woman was doing.” [Laughter.]

                                    They said, “Please—please call anytime you see something really weird like that because you never know what they’re doing.” So [chuckles] I guess—yeah, I’m affected by it even as we speak [unintelligible; 22:49]. [Laughs.] Now I know about geocaching.

                                    As it turns out, both of my sons had done it and laughed a lot when I told them that story.

LI: [Chuckles.]

LONG:                        And were seriously embarrassed, but—[Laughs.]

LI: [Chuckles.] I think it’s fair to say that if you did not know what geocaching was, that certainly did seem unusual, even if you do know. [Both chuckle.]

                                    So you spoke about the military as a more visible presence back when you were growing up than today, and I guess that made me think of two things in particular. One, do you think that that served to ease the public panic? And two, do you think that that contributed to your—I know you talked about your uncle in the Navy, but do you think that contributed to your interest in naval service and pursuing the naval ROTC program?

LONG:                        Yeah. I—I don’t think it contributed to concern or panic. If anything, I think it was sort of comforting to know that lots of  folks were willing to—to pitch in and do service in the military. And—and that’s sort of the attitude that I had about it, was that it was just something you did because the country needed people to do that kind of stuff, and—and so lots and lots of people just did it voluntarily. And so I think it was just kind of in the background and not really an overt influence.

LI:                                And how did you get interested in Dartmouth?

LONG: [Chuckles.] That’s interesting. My wife just typed in her phone and wrote, “[U.S.] Naval Academy” and showed it to me, and—and the answer to that is I thought very seriously about going to the Naval Academy, applied for an appointment from Gordon [L.] Allott, who was the senator in Colorado, and—and my cousin, who was the son of the—the Navy man, lived in our basement when I was really, really young. Served at the end of World War II when I was, you know, three, four, five years old.

                                    And then he lived with us again—he went into the Air Force. He went to the University of Denver, was [chuckles] a math major and a philosophy major there, and he went in the Air Force, and then he came back and was teaching math in one of the county schools when I was in high school. And—and Jim said to me—and he was sort of—I had no—I had no siblings, so Jim was—was the closest thing to a—to a brother I had. He was seven years older than I was. Was a really good baseball player, was president of the senior class at Lakewood High School and blah, blah, blah, and kind of a—a role model for me. My folks were divorced, and—and—and so Jim was the—the academic role model that I had.

                                    And he said, “You know, you can get the same commission if you go to Dartmouth and do ROTC as if you go to the Naval Academy, and Dartmouth is the last purely academic community left in the United States, and it has the best math department in the world.” And at that point, John [G.] Kemeny was chairman of the department, and [Thomas E.] “Tom” Kurtz was running the computer lab, and I’m sure you know the stories about Kemeny and Kurtz.

                                    And—and—and so I got a—a backup appointment to the Academy, and I turned it down, and my best friend from high school took it and went to the Naval Academy, and I went to Dartmouth instead. And—and I had—right after that, I was contacted by the [Dartmouth] Alumni Association in Denver, who invited me to a barbecue and—and started talking to me about going to Dartmouth.

                                    And I had, for decades, believed that either he or my mom—and I wasn’t sure which—had sicced them on me because it seemed sort of off that they would just have called out of the blue. And I—I mentioned that to him two or three years ago now, and he was utterly stunned and surprised and said he hadn’t talked to Mom about it, and he never talked to anybody in the Alumni Association, and, in fact, he didn’t know that they had done that.

                                    And so it was—it was really this—this sibling/cousin, whom I looked up to, and the Alumni Association who got me interested in Dartmouth. And they had a woman there, who was the first female professor at Dartmouth, Nadeshda [T.] Koroton [pronounced core-uh-TONE], who taught Russian, and I was interested in that. And they had a Navy ROTC program, and they had a neat math department, and it was Dartmouth. And that seemed really cool.

                                    And I had never been to the Northeast at all before I got off the train in—in White River Junction [Vermont] when I arrived for my freshman trip, my hike. So, yeah, it was—in a way the Navy and—and Dartmouth overlapped in a—in a most fortuitous [chuckles] sort of way.

LI:                                And did you find that transition to Dartmouth difficult or easy? How was it, arriving on campus and getting situated?

LONG:                        First year, I was pretty homesick. Colorado at that point ranked seventh among states in numbers of—of students on campus, and so there were a lot of Coloradoans. A guy from Fort Collins lived right across the hall from me, and I—I made lots of friends, and [unintelligible; 28:45] Navy ROTC unit, who are still friends to this day and actually are going to France with us in two weeks.

                                    But—but I—but I was homesick. And—and the first year, I was not really a wildly happy camper. But I came back after that first summer and—and really loved it, and from then on, I—I was—I felt very much at home and—and really enjoyed it.

                                    In 1961, when I started, freshmen—the students didn’t rush fraternities until the beginning of sophomore year, and so—so my community was—was the dorm. I lived in Choate Road [in Hanover, New Hampshire]. I lived in Cohen Hall. And I had lots of—lots of friends there with whom I’m still—still in touch now. But—but it was—it was a difficult transition [chuckles] for the first—the first year. But after that, I—I really enjoyed it, which is—again, Susan and I have laughed about it since because our daughter went to [Mount] Holyoke [College]. It was the only place she applied. It was the only place she wanted to go. And—and halfway through her first year, she insisted she wanted to transfer back to George Mason [University], of all things. And then—then went back for her sophomore year and now is—is the world’s biggest booster of Mount Holyoke. So [chuckles] there may be—

LI: Genetics.

LONG:                        —[cross-talk; unintelligible; 30:19] a while to adjust to her environment.

LI: [Chuckles.]

                                    And how did the ROTC program play into your experience at Dartmouth? Like, what were your typical responsibilities and requirements at your time there, and did that give you a community you could tether yourself to?

LONG:                        Yeah, it did. The requirements then were much less stringent than they are now. A kid these days works much harder at being in ROTC than—than I had to. Our—our freshman year, we took two classes, one of which counted for academic credit. One was a naval history class, which we did in the—in the spring quarter; in the fall, we did something called naval orientation, which you to salute them, and the junior officer gets in the car first instead of the senior officer because the senior officer gets out first. And you never carry your briefcase in your right hand; you carry it in your left hand so you can always be ready to salute. That kind of nonsense that one would learn at boot camp, in the fall.

                                    But in the spring, there was an academic class in naval history, which I—I loved. The guy who taught it was a guy named Charlie [Bestraman? Westerman? 31:37], who was from Harvard, was—Navy officers [were] teaching the Navy class, but he was—he was really good. And—and—and I now teach a two-semester naval history class at George Washington [University], probably, at least in part, because of that.

                                    I don’t remember—we had a naval engineer in class and stuff that we did. There was a celestial navigation class, which was basically [unintelligible; 32:02] trigonometry, and then a management, leadership sort of class our senior year.

                                    But, yeah, there was a group of, as I said, about 30 or 35 people in my class who were in Navy ROTC, and we met, you know, for classes every—on a normal class schedule. We had to take extra classes because some of the classes, like the naval orientation class, didn’t get academic credit, so instead of taking nine classes a year, you would take 10 or 11 classes a year to make up for the Navy.

                                    And then the Navy also met every Wednesday for a drill. Sometimes we marched. Sometimes we—and I’ve forgotten the name of the hall, but if you’re standing on the [Dartmouth[ Green looking at Dartmouth Hall, the white building to the right of Dartmouth Hall used to have a Navy installation in the basement of it, where they had Navy computers and—and that kind of stuff, analog computers. And so sometimes we would work with the technical gear. Sometimes we would literally go out and march around with rifles over our shoulders sort of things.

                                    But—but we had a lot of shared experiences and got to be—got to be good friends in the process of that. Had one—one very good friend from that group killed in Vietnam. He’s [Stephen S.] “Steve” MacVean [Class of 1965]. His name is on the Wall [Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.]. We lost four or five from my class, whose names are on—on the Wall.

                                    Yeah, the Navy unit was—was a really closely knit group, and we were obviously together the whole four years, and—and a couple of them—actually, Marc [F.[ Efron [Class of 1965] was in—was in that class, and Marc—I was only in the Navy just over two years, and then I got out because of my leg and went to Harvard Law School. And—and Marc had a two-year obligation from Navy ROTC, and—and he was a classmate of mine at—at the law school as well.

LI:                                And did you guys talk about the, you know, future, entering in the Navy as much as just being in this community? Did you talk about the—the national problems, the possibility of going to Vietnam? Was that as much of your experience as just the social affiliation?

LONG:                        Not so much. You need to remember the timeline.

LI:                                Right.

LONG:                        I was on a midshipman cruise—

LI:                                [cross-talk; unintelligible; 34:56].

LONG:                        Right, exactly. I was on a midshipman cruise aboard an aircraft carrier in Japan in the summer of 1964, and—and they asked—I didn’t have a job that was going to pay me anything special for the rest of the summer, and they gave us the opportunity to ride the ship back from Japan to San Diego if we wanted to. And I thought that would be fun, and I hadn’t had a chance to fly off the carrier, and I got to do that on the way back and—and knew I was going to do some interesting stuff because—because most of the midshipmen went home. Two or three of us stayed on to ride the ship back to San Diego.

                                    And on the night of the second of August, I was on the bridge as we’re headed back across the Pacific, and had message traffic brought up to the bridge for the captain that talked about this destroyer named the [USS] Maddox that some group of boats had been shooting at. And we got orders [chuckles] to circle and not proceed further to San Diego, to await further orders, and then two days later I saw message traffic come over about—about the shooting at the Maddox and the [USS] Turner Joy. When it happened. Real time.

                                    And I saw those messages live, and [laughs] that may really not have been a—a bright—bright thing I did, extending, because I may wind up in the South China Sea instead of back in Hanover if this doesn’t all go well. So, yeah, at that point I—I thought about it.

                                    The only other time something—we talked about the world situation a fair amount. One of my good friends, who was a fraternity brother of mine I didn’t know freshman year but I got to know him after that, and he wound up—we lived in Cohen the whole – my four years. We just formed a suite. We were all Sig Eps [members of  the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity], and we formed a suite there and lived there, which was sort of at the back door to the fraternity house. And Weaver’s [H. Gaines Jr.’s, Class of 1965] father was a colonel in the Army. His grandfather was in the Army, and he was [U.S.] Army ROTC [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps].

                                    And he spent more time talking about it, and so I spent a lot of time talking with him. Weaver graduated in Army ROTC. He got his commission, then went to UVA [University of Virginia] Law School, got his law degree, and then went on active duty with the Army and went to Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader, despite having his law degree. And so—because that’s what you did if you were [unintelligible; 37:34]. And—and—and so I talked with him a bit about it a fair amount.

                                    But we didn’t—we didn’t spend a lot of—I mean, obviously, Vietnam really wasn’t on the radar until our senior year, and even then it wasn’t really very highly visible. The—the closest thing [chuckles] to that that actually did happen was—was in my sophomore year. And I was in my room. We—we didn’t have phones, and so there were—there were two phones, one on the ground floor and one on the third floor in Cohen, and somebody came and got me and said I had a phone call.

                                    The secretary of the Navy ROTC unit was on the phone. It was a Sunday morning. And I went down and picked up the phone, and she said, “Hi, this is”—and I’ve forgotten her name—“secretary for the Navy ROTC unit. What’s your Social Security number?” And I—and I told her. And I said, “Why? What—what do you need that for?” And she said, “Well, we’re—we’re completing our records because—because of this Cuban Missile Crisis thing that’s going on, they’re talking about taking a lot of people out of school because they’re going to beef up the military really quickly because it looks like this may be really serious.”

                                    And I said, “Whoa! That’s—that’s really interesting. What—what’s going on?” Oh, wait a minute. She said, “We need your information because you guys have been training to be officers. We’ll make sure that you stay in, and they’ll take the other people now.” [Laughs.]

LI: [Chuckles.]

LONG:                        And so I sort of heaved a sigh of relief, and talked to her about it a little bit more. But I—I have a recollection of standing in the hall, talking on the phone with her, hearing about the publicity, the early-on publicity about the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hadn’t been—there hadn’t been a whole lot of publicity about it. But once the quarantine—because, after all, you wouldn’t want to call it a blockade because that would be an act of war—was imposed, the publicity got—got  a little more intense.

                                    But, yeah, so that was—the midshipman cruise in the summer of ’64 and—and the phone call during the Cuban Missile Crisis were the two most real experiences I had in terms of—of what we might be involved with, which is—your question is—is really a good one. I think—no, strike it.

                                    My perception, and I think the perceptions of a lot of people, about the military was pretty romantic. You hadn’t heard a whole lot of—of horror stories, and we knew about things that happened in the Second World War. But we were the good guys, and—and we were the good guys in Korea, too. Our people got attacked, and we were trying to help them. And—and so you really hadn’t had a whole lot of exposure to the reality of conflict and its impact on people back at—[that’s why I teach the class I do, about Normandy [France], close bracket], because I want students to understand that this sort of stuff isn’t all about [unintelligible; 40:54] 50 million of this and 50,000 of that; it’s about people and families and communities. And so doing a biography of one—one person buried at Omaha Beach is my way of—of teaching that.

                                    But I think I was pretty naïve and—and romantic in my—in my view of—of all of these things when—when I was at Dartmouth and even when I—when I went on active duty with the Navy. And—and my first stops when—when I went on active duty, I went home—when we graduated, I went back to Colorado, and—and I had orders to report to [Naval Station] Norfolk[, Virginia]. I was at home long enough to be best man for the friend of mine who went to the Naval Academy, so we did a—a Navy wedding in Denver with—with a bunch of his classmates and me, with, you know, dress whites with high collars and swords and all that sort of stuff and crossed swords outside the church.

                                    Got Doug and Patty married, and I then flew to Norfolk, where—where I attended the Navy Nuclear Weapons Training Center to learn how to be in charge of nuclear weapons, because there were nuclear weapons on the ship that I went to, and I was going to be assigned to a division that had responsibility for them. And then from there I went to guided missile school down in Dam Neck, Virginia, and then flew to France to meet my—to meet my ship. Actually, I guess I flew to Italy and met her in Naples.

                                    But even then, and—and—and I have on the wall in my office at the university the diploma I got when I graduated from the Nuclear Weapons Training Center, which looks like a parchment diploma. I mean, it’s sort of 8-1/2 by 11 paper, but it’s—it’s the Staples or Office Depot version of—of parchment—you know, that kind of looks like parchment in the background. And it’s got a gold border and all that kind of stuff, and it talks about the Navy Nuclear Weapons Training Center.

                                    But in the background of—of this picture is an image of a mushroom cloud. I have it on the wall in my office just to see who will notice it and comment on it, because I can’t—there’s no prospect that anybody anywhere now would—would issue something like that, you know. But people didn’t think about that kind of stuff. It was—you know, it was just the symbol of American military power, and so it was okay.

                                    So, yeah, I have my Dartmouth diploma, my Harvard diploma and my Navy Nuclear Weapons Training Center diploma hanging on the wall in the office. It was a stunningly different time.

LI:                                Do you think that your perception of it as romantic was shared by both—your—the other people in the Dartmouth ROTC program and at the naval training center?

LONG:                        Pretty much, yeah. I mean, I think everybody thought they were going off to do good things, to serve a good cause. They didn’t anticipate having to do hard or—or worrisome things. At least I think that’s true of most of them. I’m sure that there were some who were more aware than I was, but—but I think most people had a fairly innocent view of—of the world, the government—you know, a lot of the—I think [President] Lyndon [B.] Johnson and Richard [M.] Nixon did a whole lot to—to change the way people—people think about American government, and—and—and I think Vietnam did a lot to change the way people think about military commitment.

LI:                                And did you feel that Dartmouth prepared you well in terms of training?

LONG:                        As a general proposition, absolutely. For—for the military, I probably [chuckles] wasn’t as well prepared as I would have been had I gone to the Naval Academy, but—but I was certainly well enough prepared that I—that I did well in that I got really good reviews. And, yeah, our ship had five young officers who stood officer of the deck-watcher on it. Three of them were full lieutenants, which is the equivalent of a captain in the Army or the Air Force. And—and we had—it was a flagship, so we had lots of officers aboard. There were three who were full lieutenants, and the other two were my roommate and myself, who were both ensigns, and they skipped over a whole class of lieutenant JGs [junior grades] to—to have us be ODs [officers of the deck], and it was because the captain had confidence in our judgment and what we were doing, so I’m basing my—my assessment that I was reasonably well qualified on his assessment of—of me, however ill-founded that might have been.

LI:                                So you were with your roommate on the ship, from Dartmouth?

LONG:                        No. No, no, this was my roommate on the ship, who was—

LI:                                Okay.

LONG:                        —actually—he was from [the University of] Notre Dame.

LI:                                Okay.

                                    And could you describe that ship for me in I guess more technical descriptive terms?

LONG: [Chuckles.] Okay, yeah.

LI:                                And then we’ll get into everything else.

LONG:                        The USS Springfield, a light guided missile cruiser, designation CLG-7, 610 feet long, 68 feet wide, a crew of about 1,200. Had three six-inch guns and two five-inch guns forward. Had a carrier missile launcher aft, which was a—a—one of the Navy’s earliest guided missiles that was an anti-aircraft missile but which was also capable of, as I said, of using nuclear weapons against ground targets. The notion of shooting nuclear weapons against aircraft I think was never really seriously considered, but you could use an anti-aircraft missile and, by using the radar fire control system, cause it to—to be a tactical nuclear weapon.

                                    It was a World War II cruiser that had originally had nine six-inch guns on it in the Pacific [Ocean], and then it was rebuilt to be a flagship, so they took one of the forward six-inch turrets off and the after one, put the missile system on, and—and added a deck—they extended the superstructure forward to build a special deck for—to house an admiral and his staff. So the admiral who was in command of the U.S. 6th Fleet, which was all of the ships in the Mediterranean [Sea] at that point, was permanently aboard the Springfield.

                                    And—and the crew was—was pretty much hand picked. I—I had—the—the chief petty officer at the Dartmouth ROTC unit—when we got ready to graduate, they ask you to fill out what we called a dream sheet, which was an application for your job, and—and you—you know, a lot of people would put “destroyers on the East Coast” or “submarines” or “naval aviation” or whatever.

                                    The chief knew I was—I was in the top of the class, and he knew how the Navy assigned people, and he thought the Springfield was the best job you could have in the Navy, being a flagship, so you’d have attention of really senior people, and being home ported about halfway between Nice [France] and Monte Carlo [Monaco], put it in a really nice place. And—and so the chief—and the way they did it: They took I don’t know how many from the Naval Academy and gave them what they wanted, and then they took the person who was first in the class at Harvard—the Navy ROTC class at Harvard, at Princeton, Yale and then Dartmouth.

                                    And so I was going to get my pick, and—and so the chief just said, “Don’t put down ‘destroyer’ or ‘cruiser’ or something like that, you know, from Newport, Rhode Island. Put down USS Springfield, but don’t put anything else on your—on your sheet.” And so I did, and I got the Springfield.

                                    And they—they tried to sort of hand pick the crew all the way up and down because, being the flagship, the ship had—had quasi-diplomatic functions as well, so we were in—in Algeria during the crisis there. We were in Lisbon right after the U.S. had voted against Portugal on questions concerning Angola. We would go into Athens [Greece] when we thought there was going to be a revolution that would overthrow the king and queen. We did that three times in the time I was aboard. The fourth time, we didn’t get there on time, and they did in fact overthrow the king and queen.

                                    But then from—if you were in Athens for three days, you would immediately go to Istanbul [Turkey] for three days, and the next time around you would go to Istanbul first and then to Athens because you had to keep both the Greeks and the Turks happy.

                                    So it was a really interesting position, but they were worried about—the sailors were—were hand picked. They did not want a bunch of U.S. sailors getting drunk and starting brawls, you know, when the admiral or—or the admiral and diplomats were off conducting national diplomacy matters. And so the kids that were aboard were—were—were good kids. The sailors that I had responsibility for were—were college qualified, very bright, serious young sailors.

                                    It was an—I was [unintelligible; 51:19]. I really got kind of the very best the Navy had to offer in my very short Navy career. I got to do the midshipman cruise in the western Pacific, and the captain aboard the [USS] Bennington, the carrier that I was on—attitude was, “When we’re at sea, you’re gonna learn about the Navy, but when we’re in port, I want you to go off the ship and learn as much as you can about Japan.” And so we went all over Japan on the ship, and I got to see a lot of it when we were in port.

                                    And then when I—I went to the Springfield, likewise—I had never been to Europe before. I  had never been out of the country except to drive in Canada, driving from Hanover back to Denver, because it was easier to—to cross through Canada than it was to drive south of the Great Lakes in the winter because of the snow. So I had been to Canada, but that was the only time I’d ever been out of the country before I got into the Navy. And so my experience about the Springfield was—was a—a good one.

                                    And then had I—had I not broken my leg, I might very well have stayed in, in the Navy and—and made it a career. But every year, the Navy ranks all of the people, starting with the chief of naval operations, that has the lineal number one, and the—the worst of the newest class of ensigns has the highest number, and—and you sort of get orders and jobs and promotions based on your lineal number. And I—I started out with—with, you know, one of the best lineal numbers in—in the Class of 1965, and then after I broke my leg, I was going to drop way down because I wasn’t doing anything that was of any use to anybody. I was stationed at Bethesda [Maryland] nominally, but not doing anything; I was just in the hospital. And so I knew that was not a—a good career move, so I decided to get out and go to law school.

LI:                                So could you speak a little bit about your responsibilities aboard this very esteemed ship?

LONG:                        Yeah, I was junior division officer for—for the nuclear weapons division. When I first went aboard, there was a lieutenant who was in charge of the group, and I—I was his assistant, and so I was kind of responsible for the morale of the—of the sailors. Actually taught a calculus class for him in—in people’s off time aboard ship because a lot boys were interested in that. And—and that was sort of my day job.

                                    My—my other job was—because I was a line officer (that is, not a medical corps, supply corps, staff type job), I stood watches on the bridge. And—and you start out as the junior officer of the watch, and there will be an officer of the deck, who is in command of the ship when the captain’s not on the bridge, and—and the OD is responsible for carrying out whatever evolution the ship is supposed to be doing.

                                    And so I was a junior officer of the watch for a while, and then got to be officer of the deck after a while. And they had two cla- —officer of the deck, independent steaming, which means you’re out by yourself, and all you need to do [chuckles] is get from Point A to Point B without hitting something. And then later as—as officer of the deck in—in formation steaming, when you’re sailing with other ships and you have to perform movements and evolutions involving more than one ship. And—and I wound up as qualified as a fleet operations officer of the deck.

                                    So had to watch bringing the ship out of Istanbul down through the Dardanelles on one occasion. And—and also we found the—the Russian med squadron anchored east of Crete. They couldn’t do replenishments under way. The U.S. Navy—essentially, everything that we [came? 55:28] to a war or used came while we were under way because we didn’t really have a base at Villefranche[-sur-Mer, France]. We had a buoy that we moored to, but that was it. And so we’d get fuel from a tanker, and we’d get stores from a Navy stores ship, and that would all come during underway replenishments for the entire time the ship was there.

                                    And—and the Russians weren’t able to do that, and—and so we steamed through the middle of their—of their anchorage, and all of the Intelligence guys had cameras mounted all over the ship, taking pictures of—of the Russian med squadron. Sailed through the middle of them and did a 360-degree loop around them so we could get pictures from every angle, and then sailed off to Beirut [Lebanon], where we were headed.

                                    And so two kinds of duties. One was—one was the division responsibilities, and initially I was with the—the—the warheads division, and then later, I was in the missile fire control division, which was the group of—of technicians that were responsible for the radar sets that controlled the—the carrier guided missiles.

                                    There’s another group that did the sort of surface search radar for the regular—ship’s navigation and that kind of stuff. The only radars we had responsible for—responsibility for were the—the ones that controlled the guided missiles.

LI:                                And in looking back, what do you think was your favorite part of this naval experience?

LONG:                        Hmph.

LI:                                I’m sure it’s hard to decide.

LONG:                        Well, I’m not going to answer the question the way you put it. I’m going to split it. Probably the best thing for me was having enormous responsibility thrust on me really early and being expected to discharge it. No excuses. You know, you’re just given a job, and you go do it I think much more rapidly than—than our colleagues did in civilian life. I mean, the notion of have signature authority over—over [chuckles] a group of nuclear warheads causes me to get chills as I sit here, when I was 21 or 22 years old, whatever it was. So I think that—I think the responsibility was probably the best thing for me.

                                    The thing I enjoyed the most was being aboard this ship, which took me from—you know, from Lisbon on the west to Gibraltar and Valencia [Spain] and Barcelona [Spain] and Marseille [France] and Toulon [France] and our home port at Villefranche, and—and Naples [Italy], Athens and the Greek islands and Istanbul and—you know, just all over the place.

                                    And—and the captain had the same philosophy that the fellow did on the—on the carrier, which was if you were one of the five officers of the deck who stood OD watches under way, you didn’t have to stand watch in port. And—and so I did when I was—when I was a junior officer and have duty one day out of three. But two days out of three, you could go ashore and do whatever you wanted to when you were in port.

                                    And so I got to see a lot of places in Europe that I wouldn't have gotten to see otherwise and do a lot of things that I would never have gotten to do otherwise, and I really enjoyed that. And—and it was fascinating. It was a fascinating time to be there. And—and great fun for me because I had obviously studied a lot about it but had never been [to] any of those places. And so I was really kind of privileged to get to do that.

LI:                                And how often were you in port?

LONG:                        Oh, often—again, because of the diplomatic part, we’d be in port for three days, and then we’d be at sea for five days, and then we’d be at port for three or four days, and then we’d be at sea for three or four days. Unless there was something particular going on, a big exercise or something like that, that caused us to be out for longer, we didn’t—we didn’t get to—we weren’t at sea for long periods of time.

LI:                                And because of that, did you feel any sort of isolation throughout your time in the Navy? I guess you were not at sea for, you know, months at a time, but what was that like?

LONG:                        No, I didn’t. Yeah, we had, obviously, a group of friends on the ship. Most of the officers—a lot of the officers were married, and their families lived in Villefranche, and so I got to know their families when we were in our home port and—and was just having, you know, fun traveling around and—and doing things. But I didn’t feel at all isolated.

                                    We obviously didn’t have any sort of social media ability to communicate, but you could make telephone calls home in cases of emergency, and you wrote a lot of letters. [Chuckles.] And so I—I wrote letters to my family and that sort of thing and got letters from them and—and so didn’t really feel isolated. It was not at all like being on a submarine, where you go out for three months and go down and—and now they’re able to communicate from submarines, but in those days, people who were on submarines didn’t get to communicate. So I—I didn’t feel isolated at all.

LI:                                Okay. And what was your access to news like? And do you think that it was privileged access because you were on this flagship ship?

LONG:                        Yeah, we had—had good access. We put out—somebody aboard the ship put out sort of a daily newspaper aboard, you know, based on information that they were getting from AP [Associated Press], UPI [United Press International], Reuters kind of stuff. When we were in port, you could obviously pick up local newspapers and—and so on as well. But, yeah, we did have really much better insight than a lot of people did.

                                    Every port—before we would go in, the embassy in that country would—we had a helicopter aboard the ship. They would fly somebody out to the ship who would conduct a brief- —I’m sure they did lots more extensive briefings for the admiral and his staff, but they would always do a briefing for the wardroom, and so all of the officers got to sit in on a briefing about whatever the political and economic affairs of the country were and the U.S. relationships with that country and what the sensitive points were and that sort of thing. So we kind of got a behind-the-scenes look at—at a lot of the diplomatic news of—of the day, which—which other folks would not have had access to.

LI:                                And did you discuss that a lot amongst yourselves?

LONG:                        Yeah. Yeah, we did. People on the ship were—were interested in that sort of thing, and—and so, yeah, they—people talked a lot about the places we were going and—and the things that were going on.

LI:                                It must have been so exciting, especially at such a young age.

LONG:                        It was—it was really fascinating. Yeah, it was kind of a political science class on the move.

LI: [Chuckles.]

                                    And how would you characterize the culture amongst the crew?

LONG:                        It was—it was really sort of middle class. There were—I mean, there were a lot of officers with Ivy League educations or Naval Academy educations. But—but everybody was—was friendly, open, collegial, and—and, while you observed rank and you didn’t sort of go drinking with the sailors when you were in port (that was sort of bad form)—and—and they would salute and you’d salute back—but it was a sign of respect; it wasn’t a sign of domineering. And—and so it was—it was a very—a very friendly situation.

LI:                                And—

LONG:                        And it extended. I mean, I guess the first year I was there, one of the officers who had a family there invited me to come to his house for Christmas because otherwise I was a bachelor and was going to be on my own or with—with other friends—which I thought was nice. And—and the second time—again, this roommate who was from Notre Dame and I were invited by a French family to go to their house for Christmas. Neither Jim nor I was Roman Catholic, and neither of us spoke very good French. I had never [chuckles] studied French. My Russian didn’t do me a whole lot of good on the ship.

                                    But they invited us to go to their house for dinner, and they took us to a Mass at their church, which was on the outskirts of Nice, sort of extreme suburban Nice, and they—it was a Mass in which everybody in the town participated in sort of the Christmas service, but the youngest child was the—was the Christ child, and they had the sheep and the goats and the cattle in the church and did the whole Christmas story, some of it in Latin, some of it in French. The Latin, I could get along with; the French sometimes was hard to follow.

                                    But then we went back to their house after the service and had a wonderful dinner that—that the mother had prepared. She had two children and—and her husband and herself, and Jim and I. And—and this dinner lasted from, I don’t know, one o’clock in the morning until about three, with, you know, a Christmas evening feast, which was their tradition. And they were just as lovely as they could possibly have been.

                                    They didn’t speak much English, and we didn’t speak much French, but we were able to communicate, you know, between us pretty effectively, and—and it was—they were very welcoming and—and—and very lovely. And they had simply invited—you know, “We’d like to have a couple of officers from the ship come over and spend Christmas Eve with us,” which I thought was particularly thoughtful.

LI:                                I guess that also speaks to the greater attitude towards military service during this period, too.

LONG:                        Yeah, and it’s interesting because talking with people in—this obviously [was] in the south of France—they were very conservative, by and large. [François] Mitterrand I think would have taken his life in his hands, being a communist candidate, had he gone to the south of France to campaign, so he didn’t. They were very pro [Charles] de Gaulle. And—and—and any number of times, I had people say, “You know, you guys are here to watch the Russians and worry about the Russians, but we don’t worry about the Russians. We’re worried about the Germans. Do everything you can to make sure Germany is never reunited. They invaded us in 1914, and they invaded us again in 1940, and they’ll do it again if they get a chance, and so you gotta watch the Germans.”

                                    Which I thought was—was fascinating. Not a—not a fear that Americans thought about or—or, you know,  had ever been taught about, but they were very worried about—you know, they had been invaded in 1870, they were invaded in 1914, they were invaded in 1940, and they didn’t do so well in any of those events. And—and they were very worried about it. And I’m sure—you know, at that point obviously Germany was—was divided, and they were very happy it was divided and wanted to see them stay divided forever. [Chuckles.]

LI:                                And are there any other cultural interactions that stand out in your mind from that period of time?

LONG:                        Again, not—not really, just that it was—despite the Cold War, it was a—a very—it was a pretty innocent and still relatively romantic—people had a—had a relatively simplistic view of—of the world at that point, even though by then we were in—in northern Vietnam. I got out of the Navy at the end of 1967 and—and started law school in September. And so Vietnam was an issue at that point, but—but even at—at that point, the—the perception was largely that—almost like Korea. I mean, [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower had so endorsed [Ngô Đình] Diệm that—you know, that the general perception was he’s the good guy, the communists are the bad guy, the domino theory is real, the Russians are running everything, and we’re there to help like we were in—in Korea, and in the Pacific. I mean, the bad guys attack us, and we—and we respond. We’re the good guys. And—and that was very pervasively the attitude in the country and—and aboard ship, which I think was interesting.

                                    I have—for my class—I was the class secretary for the Class of ’65—did a survey before our 50th reunion, and then we ha a panel that [Edward G.] “Ed” Miller participated in with us, for which I thank him and I wish you would give him my regards again. But we did a panel about—about the war and how it affected people, and—and I had one member of the panel who was a pacifist and—and anti war and never participated at all.

                                    One fellow, who had severe PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], suffered alcoholism and had struggled and had never talked about any of his problems in public until he did in this panel. And I’ve forgotten the name of the room we were in, but it was over in the Hop[kins Center for the Arts], in one of the big auditoriums, and it was full. And—and the others—one was Weaver Gaines, the fellow that I mentioned, who went to law school and then went as a—a platoon commander, and—and—and one other Army officer and a Navy officer.

                                    And—and—and one of the things I asked in the questionnaire that I sent to everybody was: How much has your attitude about U.S. involvement in Vietnam changed in the period, you know, between then and now? And—and I think the general response of most people was, you know, “We’re a little smarter now than we were then. We tend to be a little more critical [chuckles] of—of public officials when they make statements than we were in those days. We tended to take what people said at face value. We’re less willing to do that now, and—and we think we weren’t backing the right people in Vietnam and, for that reason, maybe shouldn’t have been there.” Which was clearly different—different than—than most people had going into it. And—and that’s obviously the way I feel as well.

LI:                                And it sounds like there’s an interesting pairing of innocent and romantic outlook with a very rapid maturing process in terms of gaining all of this responsibility and having to execute it right away, as you were talking about.

LONG:                        Yeah. And at least in my case, the responsibility, while it could have been really dreadful and so on, never materialized for the—for the guys who—who went to Vietnam. Steve MacVean was killed very soon after he got in country. You know, the—the reality of the responsibility and the—and the reality of the situation was brought home very much more quickly. And so—yeah, I think that’s—that’s a good observation.

LI:                                And obviously you kind of had an abrupt end to your naval career, physically [chuckles] at least.

LONG:                        It’s what my wife refers to as “my lucky break.”

LI: [Laughs.] I like that.

                                    I guess could you talk a little bit about the transition from naval life into—you know, back into the academic sphere and the civilian sphere?

LONG:                        Sure. Yeah, it was—I was at Harvard, and—and when I was there—going to graduate school or professional schools in those days was different than now. The vast majority of students went from the time they were in kindergarten until they were through graduate school or law school or med school or whatever. The notion of a gap year or taking time off to do stuff in between undergraduate and graduate school really was very uncommon.

                                    And so the world at Harvard Law School when we were there, which was ’69—I’m sorry, ’67 to ’70—was composed  pretty much of two groups of people. There were people who had been in—in the academic world since they were in kindergarten, and there people who had been in the military. And those were the only two groups that were there.

                                    And—and the two—and I had lots of friends who had—had not been in the military, but the two groups pretty much stuck together. Most of my closer friends in law school were people who had been in the military before: several who had been in the Navy, a couple who had been in the [U.S. Marine] Corps and—and so on, rather than—although I had a study group that was about half and half: ex-military plus straight students.

                                    But while we were there, we went through the Cambodian incursion, we went through the assassinations, all the events of 1968 while I was in law school, and—and so I think—I think those of us who had been in the military before had—had, again, a different - and in this case more skeptical of the protests than—than the pure academic people. It wasn’t that we didn’t agree with the protesters, but we thought a lot of them were—were protesting things that they really didn’t know much about and hadn’t been questioning very much, and while we might agree with their—with their position or with their end, we thought a lot of times that the ends were—the means were not necessarily the best.

                                    But, yeah, there was one occasion when—when Susan [K. Long] had been downtown somewhere and came home the MTA [Metropolitan Transit Authority, now the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA)], got of the train in—in—in Harvard Square and walked down Broadway [in Cambridge, Massachusetts], where we lived, and—and by the time she got there—I had had the television on, and—and a riot had broken out in—in Harvard Square, and essentially every window within a two-block radius of Harvard Square had been broken except for those in—in—in a diner that was called Elsie’s [Sandwich Shop], which—the students really loved her, and they wouldn’t hurt her diner. And the windows in—in the [design research? 1:16:14] store didn’t break because it turns out they were Plexiglas and rocks and stuff bounced off instead of breaking.

                                    But all the rest of them were broken, until you got home. And—and she had literally just walked out of the Square and down the street and—and was out of it before it erupted. And didn’t know what had happened when she walked in the door of the apartment.

                                    And so, yeah, it was—it was obviously a very different time, and I think our skepticism of—of anybody, for those of us that had—had had the experience of—of being in the service, whether it be the government or—or antiwar spokesman or whomever [sic]—you know, we—we tended to ask for more corroboration and—and proof and more thought than—than a lot of the other people who were—or perhaps didn’t have that experience.

LI:                                And do you think that lack of experience manifested itself in kind of disrespectful attitudes towards those who were actually serving?

LONG:                        Oh, absolutely, yeah. There’s no que- —no question about that. Regardless of—of the attitudes of the people who were serving, anybody who was serving was by and large looked down upon and—and disrespected, yes.

LI:                                So I guess how do you account for that dramatic shift in perceptions about the military and military service?

LONG:                        Oh, I—

LI: Because you talked about how it was so romantic before.

LONG:                        The publicity attended upon Vietnam had an enormous amount to do with it. I think sort of watching the war real time on television, or at least watching video of it—film, I guess, in those days—gave people an understanding of the realities of the war that people did not have going into it in 1964, ’65. And—and I think it became apparent, you know, when—when [Ellsworth F.] Bunker and [Gen. William C.] Westmoreland come home and testify before Congress that—that “we turned the corner, and there’s light at the end of the tunnel, and we’re winning the war.” And, you know, a month later, the Tet Offensive erupts, and—and Viet Cong appear in the—inside the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

                                    Even though the Tet Offensive obviously was—was completely defeated, the notion that—that the American government and the American military either didn’t know what was going on or was lying about it became pervasive among, you know, both people who had not served in the military and—and people who did.

                                    But—but it did not, in the case of those who had been in the military, run to abusing the people who were—who were then serving, which I think was not—not the case for a lot of the folks who had not—not served before. But I think – I think shining a light on all of this stuff caused everybody to become much more aware of what was really going on.

LI:                                Mm-hm.

LONG:                        And—and to question our support for—for the regime in South Vietnam and—and, you know, sort of repeatedly refuse to implement the kinds of—of reforms that were—were being urged by the United States and—and were [planned? 1:20:09] for—for their own account, not—not for—for democracy. And so the notion that we were just there to—to do—to do good…It was pretty apparent that the people we were trying to help were not—not necessarily the good guys.

LI:                                And how else do you think your naval experience has continued to impact your life since?

LONG: [Chuckles.] Probably lots of ways. As I said, I grew up in Colorado. The same roommate and I used to go sailing when we were in Villefranche, and I love to sail, and Susan and I bought a sailboat soon after we moved back to—I practiced in L.A. for about ten years before I moved here to Washington, and we bought a sailboat here, and our kids grew up sailing, because I like being on the water and—and that sort of thing.

                                    I think it has caused me to be interested in—in the causes, the conduct and the consequences of conflict in a way that I had never been before, even though I had quite a lot of history. I think—I think the experience in the Navy gave me an interest in and a perception of the impact of conflict on our society and our culture that I would not have had had I not been in the—in the Navy.

LI:                                And with military service, so where—by comparison, at least—now, what do you think—what kind of perspective do you think has been lost, if any, amongst the younger generation?

LONG:                        It’s really hard to say, and obviously you can’t generalize because it—it turns out—and I watch this in—in this little class that I—a military history and naval history class that I teach—I have 40 students in each of them. The Normandy class, I limit it to 13, and—and I see it in both of the classes, but especially in the Normandy class because I get to know those kids really, really well. We do about twice as much work on campus as we do for a normal class, and then we spend eight days traveling together sort of 24/7.

                                    And—and I think what comes out of that is—is an awareness that—that the people that they’ve read about and they’ve studied about, at least the soldiers that they’re—that they’re doing the biographies of—were really just like them. There was a young woman in the class two years ago, who—who was—she was a sophomore at the time but very mature and very poised, and she was doing—she’s from Worcester, Massachusetts, and her soldier’s name was Aram Menzigian. And I had thought that she was probably a good bit older than the typical sophomore, and my wife, who was with me on the trip did, too.

                                    But she’s doing her eulogy standing at his graveside, and she was going through it and making a really very poised, nice presentation. All of sudden, she kind of stopped, and she looked up, and she had tears in her eyes. And she said, “Aram was 19. I’m 19. When I left to come to campus this semester, I left on the same train station he did the day he joined the Army. He lived five blocks from me. He could have been my brother or my boyfriend. He could have been the guy next door. I can graduate, join the Foreign Service, fall in love, have a family, have kids. I have every option in the world. He gave up all of his options so that I would have mine.”

                                    I got through that without my throat closing, which I don’t often do, because I love her story. But—but Pavla [Ovtchinnikova] came to realize that this guy was from her neighborhood. He lived, you know, the same way she did. He had been called on by the country to go fight, and he had died in—in the Normandy campaign and had given up everything. He didn’t have a family. There were no descendants. Nobody had ever looked into his life, and—and she was able to find his family and talk to them about what he had done before he went in the military and—and then do research about his unit after he was in the military, and learn a lot about him and—and came to see, you know, the way of the war, “the good war,” to the extent there is such a thing, and I understand that it has been said there is no good war and no bad peace—affects people, and affects families and communities.

                                    And—and I think to the extent young people today don’t have the same view of—of that sort of thing that—that we were able to get in the military, it’s because they haven’t been given the opportunity to see that. And—and, you know, Pavla obviously hadn’t been in the military, but by the time she got done doing the research of that era, she understood.

                                    And so I don’t think it’s—I don’t think there is—there is a—a fundamental difference; I think there is an informational difference. And I think that—that the only difference with—with the [unintelligible; 1:25:54] generation is—is that a lot of people haven’t had the opportunity or—or, you know, been—had the motivation to find out about it because they have lots of other stuff going on in their lives, and, you know, the idea of—of learning about war is not really high on a whole lot of people’s agendas. And—and so they—they haven’t done it. And so it’s—it’s a—I think it is a benign neglect as much as anything.

                                    I think unlike the period of the years following Vietnam, when it was an overt hostility, I think since the first Gulf War, when—when the parade was held to honor the people who came home from—from the Gulf War, and—and—and the people who fought in Vietnam—that parade was specifically dedicated to the folks in Vietnam. People had come to realize that a lot of the people who served the country in Vietnam, you know, were poisoned with Agent Orange and had a lot of things happen to them—and obviously had PTSD and all kinds of other things that people didn’t appreciate at the time and—and now understand a lot better.

                                    And I think there is an awareness of that. I think there is not a sort of day-to-day sensitivity to it among most folks, which may be a good thing. But I think it’s really a question of not having been exposed on a personal level, not having had, you know, a brother or a cousin or a neighbor who’s gone off and been in the military and had the experiences that caused you [follow it? 1:27:35] and understand that—that, you know, they really are people like everybody else, who are—are doing something that they think is—is worthwhile and worthwhile for the country, and they have, you know, similar political ideas as—as others do, and—and economic ideas and—and so on but—but simply haven’t elected to go serve in the military.

                                    Yeah, I am—I am one of the—the ultra radicals who think that initiating a form of national service is a really good idea. It’s not going to happen. But—but I think having everybody required to do some form of national service would be a good thing because I think it causes people to get to know folks from other part[s] of the country and folks from different backgrounds and different races and—and religions, in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise do. And—and, you know, it could be a year on—on something like the WPA [Works Progress Administration], you know, repairing national parks, or working in hospitals. It wouldn’t have to be in the military.

                                    But I think—I think that notion of service to the community is a—is a good thing, which benefits both the broader community and the individuals. And today, the only—the only experience people have like that is—is those who go to college. They share that experience with—with folks—yeah, I got to meet lots of people from places—my roommate was from—at—at Dartmouth, my freshman roommate was from Crossett, Arkansas. I hadn’t known a whole lot of people from Arkansas in my entire life [laughs], and so getting to know [Donnie?] was—was a real privilege.

                                    And—and I think that kind of experience happened to a lot of people in the Second World War, and it happened in Vietnam, where—where—and it’s happening now, where people wind up getting to know folks from different circumstances than theirs. But because it’s—it’s not a universal obligation, I think the—the pool is not as broad as it would be otherwise. And—and so I—I am an advocate of some form of national service.

                                    Here endeth the sermon.

LI: [Chuckles.]

                                    So I think many would argue that our nation has lost a shared sense of self and sense of values. Do you think that that has any relation to that lack of commonality in military service or any sort of national service?

LONG:                        Well, I don’t know.

LI:                                Or is that a stretch?

LONG:                        Well, I don’t—I’m just not sure. Sometimes I think that—I think in some people that’s the case. They really are just interested in “me.” But I think, when given an opportunity or put in a circumstance, most folks seem to be willing to pitch up. And so I’m—I guess I’m less of a pessimist on that front than—than that position would normally connote. But I—I do think that—that there is certainly an opportunity to indulge that, which is exercised a lot. And we would be better for encouraging a shared sense of obligation.

LI:                                And could you tell me a little bit about your decision to go into teaching after you finished your law degree?

LONG:                        Yeah. Well, I didn’t do it after I finished  my law—or I did it actually [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:31:32].

LI:                                I’m sorry, [cross-talk; unintelligible; 1:31:32].

LONG:                        I did it 29 years after I finished my law degree.

LI:                                Right. [Chuckles.] That’s what I meant, sorry.

LONG:                        Yeah, that was really odd circumstances. I had always loved history. I had always loved teaching and working with young people, both in the firm and—and otherwise. And—and so I had always kind of thought when I got finished practicing law, I would—I would—I would teach something. And a number of odd circumstances—I practiced corporate securities and banking law, and so I spent my life on airplanes flying around the country, working on deals, literally just all the time.

                                    And—and I had two pulmonary emboli, and my doctor said, “You know, maybe you should think about spending less time on airplanes than—than you have in the past.” My  mother died from a blood clot. They were never able to figure out what caused the two pulmonary emboli that I have, but they really didn’t want me spending nearly as much time on airplanes as I used to when I was practicing.

                                    And right at the same time that happened, my law firm adopted an early retirement policy really focused on people who were not contributing to the firm as much as—as one might had wished, because the firm had been expanding by merging with other firms a lot, and—and not everybody seemed to have the same work ethic that—that we thought was a good thing, and so we wanted to encourage those people to retire.

                                    And so they adopted a policy that said essentially, “If you aren’t bringing in as much money as—as you—as we think you ought to”—on some kind of a formula—“all you have to do is say you want to retire early, and we will pay you until you turn 65, and—and then you can go on regular retirement. But if you are—if you’re contributing economically, you would have to get permission from the management committee to retire early.”

                                    And so—my firm was based in Cleveland [Ohio], and so having had the—the pulmonary emboli and [chuckles; unintelligible; 1:33:28]—I had also talked to—to [Ronald H.] “Ron” Spector, who was a military historian, naval historian at George Washington, and thought about coming to GW and teaching, and—and when that opportunity arose, I flew over Cleveland, and I met with the management committee and said, “I think I want to retire early.” “You can’t do that! You know why we adopted this policy. It’s not so you can retire.” And I said, “Yeah, I—I know that, but I can also read, and I know that if you say I can retire, I can.”

                                    And—and so after a day of discussion, they agreed, at least in part because of the medical reasoning, and—and so I retired the end of I guess December 1998 and spent the summer studying French and started Ph.D. classes at GW in the fall and—and finished in February of ’05 and sort of moved out of the corner office in a law firm, either the largest or second largest in the world, depending on how you count it, into a—a TA [teaching assistant] cubicle in—in the—in the teaching assistant office at GW, which is really good for the humility, I got to tell you—

LI: [Chuckles.]

LONG:                        —and—and started teaching right then, as a—as a teaching assistant. And—and that summer, they asked me if I’d be willing to teach the Strategy and Policy graduate class, which is an Elliot School [of International Affairs]—foreign affairs, international affairs school. It’s a requirement that they take a class called Strategy and Policy, which is a history course, but it—it has—it has a lot of—international affairs and strategy orientation in it, whatever you want to put in it.

                                    So I taught that that first summer, and I’ve been teaching regular classes then, ever since, and finished in ’05 and have been teaching full time since then. The people have been really nice. They sort of let me do whatever I want to, so I teach a two-semester series of military history classes, which I’ll do starting in the fall. We start with the Battle of Megiddo in 1479 BC and finish somewhere this side of Vietnam in the spring.

                                    And then the alternate year, which I did this year, I teach a two-semester naval history class, and we kind of nod and wink at the Greeks and Romans a little bit, but we start with the Age of Sail, about 1400, in the fall and carry it through the Battle of Trafalgar and Napoleonic Wars in the fall, and then come again into the post-Vietnam era in the spring.

                                    I do those two every other year, those two sets of courses, and then I’m teaching the constitutional history class in the fall this year, and I teach the Vietnam class—or the Normandy class, I’m sorry—every—every spring. I sometimes teach our Vietnam class—I teach a class on the Age of Sail. And so they kind of let me do whatever I want to, which is really fun.

                                    And my wife—when I started talking about leaving the practice, which I enjoyed, but I had always kind of had this in the back of my mind—said, “You know, it’s not gonna be as much fun as you think it is. The kids now don’t work as hard, and they’ll be playing on their iPhones and—and eating doughnuts and stuff. They don’t do the work, and it’s not gonna be as much fun as you think it is.”

                                    And it turns out, really for the first time in 49 years, she was wrong.

LI: [Chuckles.]

LONG:                        It has been as much fun as I thought it would be, and—and the kids really do get engaged and really do do the work, and really do think about it, at least most of them. And—and I have absolutely loved it. It’s been enormous fun.

LI:                                It sounds like it’s a unique opportunity for all of your interests to kind of intersect.

LONG:                        Pretty much. Yeah, it really is. It is.

LI:                                And does interacting with these students—this might sound like a strange question—does it make you hopeful for America’s future?

LONG:                        Yeah. It’s not a strange question. It’s—it’s a wonderful question, and the answer is absolutely. Yeah, I have—I  have lots and lots and lots of confidence about their empathy, about their ability to think for themselves and to be critical and not just to accept things at face value but, without being abusive or disrespectful, to find out the truth and—and to make good judgments based on that. So, yeah, absolutely, yes.

LI:                                And what do you think—just because this is, you know, a project focused on the Vietnam War and you’ve obviously done a lot of rumination about it—what do you think its legacy has been for our nation?

LONG:                        It’s been good and bad. I think—I think the disrespect for the government is—and—and a lot of those [unintelligible; 1:38:49]—and goodness knows, I—I don’t respect a lot of people in government [chuckles], myself. But I think they’ve earned it independently. I don’t think it’s just because they’re in government.

                                    But I think that sort of disrespectful attitude toward government qua government is—is not a good thing. I think questioning and—and holding people to prove the validity of what they’re saying and expecting them to tell the truth and requiring them to tell the truth is a good thing. And I think Vietnam—Vietnam and Watergate and a lot of the [unintelligible; 1:39:26]—at least in part, Watergate stems from—from Vietnam, and I think they’re directly related.

                                    I think—I think the demanding that public servants be public servants and tell the truth and so on, I think is a good thing, and that has come from it.

                                    I think the disrespect of the military that was endemic for a long time in the wake of—of Vietnam has now passed, but it has kind of morphed into an indifference because, as I said before, I think people aren’t compelled to think about it. And when they do, and—and when they think about public  service in whatever form, I think—I think it doesn’t carry the same malice that it did in the ‘70s and early ’80s. So, yeah, I think questioning government, not—not disrespecting government came out of it and was a good thing.

LI:                                And what would you consider the biggest challenge for America going forward?

LONG:                        I think the biggest challenge for America going forward is its polarization. I think the country is—is heavily, heavily divided and racial and religious and ethnic backgrounds and that in fact it’s getting worse instead of better, and I view that as—as really very problematic.

                                    I think the biggest risk is the one you identified earlier on. I think there is a—a very serous risk of terrorism. I think it is approximating certainty. I think there is also a tendency in—in leadership to focus exclusively on the terrorist risk, and I think the nation-state risk is real as well. I worry about our—our friend [Vladimir V.] Putin and what he’s doing with Russia. I worry about the Chinese as they build nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which are not traditional Chinese weapons, and as they lay claim to the South China Sea. I see the potential for—for disagreement, if not conflict, on a state level emerging again in ways that it’s really been missing since the beginning of the ’90s. So I see serious risk.

                                    But what I—what I worry about most, I think, is—is the notion of—of people not respecting one another as individuals, the disrespect for people on all kinds of—of grounds, which is one of the reasons that I think the idea of national service is a good one. I think if you force people to deal with individuals as people, a lot of that would go away. But people are able to kind of stay within their communities, whether ideological or religious or political or economic if they want to now, and—and that tends to foster this divisiveness.

                                    There was a piece of a skit on Saturday Night Live last weekend, in which—I guess it was a replay, and it—it—yeah, clearly it was a replay because it was Seth [A.] Meyers, and he was announcing that Osama bin Laden had been—had been killed and that it had increased President [Barack H.] Obama’s approval rating to 56 percent. And Seth Meyers then said, “Which clearly demonstrates that there’s absolutely nothing that will persuade the other 44 percent of our people to think that Obama is—is doing anything right.” And—and I fear that that joke, you know, puts its fingers on a really sore spot. The country is—is very deeply bifurcated on all kinds of grounds, and I worry about that.

LI:                                I think that you’ve answered at least all that I wanted to touch on, so thank you. Are there any final thoughts or remarks you’d like to share?

LONG:                        No, I just want to thank you and Professor [Edward G.] Miller  and the others that are—that are working on this project. I think—I think it’s a terrific idea. I think the Vietnam era was—was one that changed the country forever, and some can say in some ways for the better, in some ways for the worse, as we’ve said. And I think understanding it and trying to get, you know, different perspectives from folks who lived through it is—is a good thing. And—and this is the only time you can do it. They’re going to be gone, and—and so I think what you’re doing is a terrific thing. And thank you.

LI:                                Well, thank you. We obviously couldn’t do it without your participation, so it’s very, very appreciated.

LONG:                        It was—it was a pleasure. You do a good job of interviewing.

LI:                                Well, thank you so much. And we’ll be probably in touch later, after this, but for now I’m—I think it’s a good place to stop.

LONG: Terrific. Thank you very much.

[End of interview.]