Joseph McBride: A Former Newspaper Reporter Recalls Sterling Hall

In August of 1970, Joseph McBride was 23 years old, working for the Wisconsin State Journal. He was the youngest male reporter on the staff and therefore designated as the man who would cover the violent opposition towards the Vietnam War on the University of Wisconsin- Madison campus. He was one of the local reporters sent to cover the Sterling Hall bombing.

The night of the bombing, McBride had been in California working on writing his now-republished book on the film director John Ford. Sunday the 23^rd, McBride met with the film director Orson Welles and was cast in the film, “The Other Side of the Wind.”

McBride recalled that he and Welles had talked about the recent political climate. He told Welles, “The students are getting violent; they’re going to kill somebody pretty soon.”

According to McBride, at first the conservative general public was in support of the war. However, once their sons started being drafted and dying in Vietnam, a lot of people changed their minds.

He recalled the June 1969 issue of Life magazine that documented the pictures of 242 dead soldiers that died in one week brought the stark reality to a lot of people in the US after it had published, and Americans started to become disillusioned. By 1967, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for the Kennedy administration and once an advocate for the Vietnam War, was seeking peace talks to end it.

When McBride, who is now a professor in California, flew back to Madison on Aug. 24 and arrived at 7:30 a.m., he asked his cab driver what had happened since he’d been away. The cab driver answered, “The students just blew up a building.”

McBride worked the night shift at the State Journal, and when the Sterling Hall bombing story broke he helped report on consequential developments that happened because of it.

He remembered writing a story in which the headline was “Sterling Hall phoenix rises from the ashes.” It was about how the university planned to rebuild the destroyed wing of Sterling Hall. McBride said that he had friends who were angry at him for writing that story, despite his personal position against the war.

“I thought the war was terrible, but I didn’t approve of violence,” said McBride. “I didn’t approve of firebombing building and, certainly, blowing up a building was terrible.”

Aside from violence of the bombing, McBride was regularly exposed to violence while covering the previous protests and riots happening around the campus and the country at the time.

McBride said that protests would usually be around the library square, where hundreds to thousands of students would gather. He said that about 100 or 200 protesters would break off- “the ones who were really radical”- and would break windows along the stores on State Street and set fire to buildings. McBride specifically recalled a supermarket on campus that protesters set on fire and destroyed.

“There were 40,000 students, there were several thousand who were against the war,” said McBride. “Only about 200 people would get violent.”

Another form of violence that worried McBride was the police brutality happening to peaceful protesters on campus. One specific and notable instance being the Dow Chemical protest, also known as Dow Day.

Dow Chemical made Napalm for U.S. use in the Vietnam war. Napalm is a gel that sticks to whatever it touches and severely burns that target- human or otherwise. The job recruiters of Dow Chemical went to the UW- Madison commerce building to look for potential job candidates.

On Dow Day, students had a sit-down protest in the commerce building in an attempt to stop the Dow recruiters from getting to where they needed to be to do their job. However, police quickly cleared out the hallways by beating protesters with batons.

McBride said that he was outside holding a bullhorn for one of the men leading the protest and prominent protester, Robert Cohen. Across the street from them was a group of policemen in riot gear gathered near the campus bell tower.

McBride detailed how Robert Cohen was daring the police to charge across the street. Then they called his bluff and started charging the students. McBride said he’d dropped the bullhorn and dodged out of the way once the policemen had started charging.

“They went in there and just beat the hell out of the students,” said McBride.

Dow Day was the first time tear gas was used in an anti-war demonstration in the U.S. McBride cited this as something that led to the radicalization of a lot of people on the campus. The result was increased anger and frustration in students.

“When I say the students rioted, it started with the police beating people up, the non-violent protesters,” said McBride. “That was kind of a pattern. Students would have a non-violent protest and the police would start tear gassing them and clubbing them.”

Although McBride was tear gassed a lot, he learned from observations to stay a safe distance from the action and to anticipate where it was going. He would run a block ahead of skirmishes and take notes out of sight, since reporters weren’t viewed highly by either the protesters or law enforcement.

“They didn’t like their illegal actions reported on,” said McBride.

He said that the photographers got the brunt of the beating in the journalism community since they had to be up close in the action.

McBride recalled an instance where a Capitol Times photographer aimed to take a picture of a police officer with a club at one of these protests but got a picture of a cinder block the officer had thrown at the photographer before it knocked his teeth out.

After a while of reporting on this violence, McBride found it to be unpleasant, understandably so.

“I started at night when the sun went down,” said McBride. “I would feel this terrible pain in my stomach. My stomach would start to get in knots from anxiety.”

McBride said that the atmosphere of the town was very paranoid for about a couple of months after the bombing, to the point where he had experienced it directed toward himself when he was assigned to report on the opening of an art gallery in the UW- Madison communications building.

At the time, McBride sported a longer hairdo and a mustache- the latest fashion. While reporting, he always carried a black briefcase containing books, papers and other things to aid in his job. While he had been reporting in the art gallery, someone complained to security about a “long-haired student” with a black briefcase they suspected to be a bomb.

“They demanded to look at the briefcase, and I was not happy about that,” said McBride. “That kind of thing happened a couple of times.”

McBride also acknowledged that the bombing was counterproductive to the antiwar agenda because students and locals were worried about another attack on campus, despite the proven involvement the Army Math Research Center had in the Vietnam War.

“One thing that always bothered me a lot was they saw a bicycle in the bike rack there, so they knew that there was somebody in the building…” said McBride. “They’re culpable of killing Robert Fassnacht. It wasn’t just an unfortunate accident.”

He also attributed lessened antiwar activism around the country to the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, a nail-bomb attack that killed two people and injured others executed by members of Weather Underground. McBride said that Nixon eventually ended the draft, which caused a lot of people to lose interest.

On the topic of the still-missing Leo Burt, McBride has a theory that he was an informant. This theory also isn’t unheard of.

He said that one thing that points to that possibility is that Paul Soglin had said there was an unmarked law enforcement vehicle following the van holding the explosives and bombers. However, when Media Milwaukee contacted Paul Soglin, he said that that piece of information had just been a rumor he had heard.

Another, more credible, piece of evidence that leads McBride to believe that Leo Burt might have been an informant is the existence of the declassified FBI Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO. The program’s goal was to infiltrate, surveil, and destabilize subversive political groups in the US.

“[It] was to turn the public against the protesters by making them appear crazy radicals,” said McBride. “Some of them were violent people but others were encouraged by there government agents who infiltrated them, which is not unusual in politics.”

McBride said that a lot of people think Leo Burt was an agent provocateur working for the US government and that the fact he’s never been found is suggestive that it could be true. He also cited Leo Burt’s character as something that set him apart from the other members of “The New Year’s Gang,” and one that fit the profile of someone who might have been recruited as an agent provocateur.

Burt was a member of the ROTC, he was part of the rowing team and, according to McBride, a conservative. McBride described the other three co-conspirators as “ne’er-do-wells” and “klutzes.”

“They were kind of antiwar idiots, frankly,” said McBride. “Karl Armstrong was the mastermind of this thing, and his younger brother Dwight, who was kind of passive- who [Karl] manipulated into coming along with him.”

McBride asserted that he doesn’t agree with fighting violence with violence, especially since it didn’t help the antiwar movement’s public image. He said there were better ways, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King proved.

On the topic of Burt’s fate, McBride said that he could be anywhere if he “went underground,”

“He could be out of the country,” said McBride. “You have to wonder why a guy would give up his whole life to do that, too. That’s interesting if [Burt being an informant] is true.”