Lippman says her first visit to the local Democratic party headquarters came in 1958. Looking for a day- care center to take care of her son while she worked, she had been appalled by the conditions encountered at one of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income residents. “All I remember is the stench of rotten milk, the dark hallways, the paucity of supplies. I had been a teacher in private nursery schools. The contrast was so great. We took one look at that room and left. That stirred me up”.
The visit to the party headquarters proved disappointing, however. Describing it as “the proverbial smoke- filled room”, Lippman says she became aware for the first time that corruption within the party might actually be the reason behind the city’s thinly disguised hostility toward poor residents. Instead of going back to the headquarters, Lippman decided to join up with one of the many clubs aimed at reforming the Democratic party and ousting the last vestiges of the Tammany Hall machine. Dubbed the Woodrow Wilson/FDR Reform Democratic Club, Lippman and her club began showing up at planning and city-council meetings, demanding a greater say.
“Our primary goal was to fight Tammany Hall, Carmine DeSapio and his henchman”,[2] says Lippman. “I was the representative to the city council and was very much involved in creating a viable urban-renewal plan that went beyond simply adding more luxury housing to the neighborhood”.
Such involvement would blossom into greater political activity during the 1960s. By 1965, Lippman had become an “outspoken” supporter for political candidates like William Fitts Ryan, a Democratic elected to Congress with the help of reform clubs and one of the first U.S. representatives to speak out against the Vietnam War.
It wasn’t long before Lippman, too, was an outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in Indochina. “I was against the Vietnam war from the time Kennedy sent troops”, she says. “I had read the stories by reporters and journalists sent to cover the early stages of the conflict. I really believed their forecast that it would become a quagmire”.
Such opposition permeated the Stallman-Lippman household. In 1967, Lippman remarried. Her new husband, Maurice Lippman, a major in the Air National Guard, resigned his commission to demonstrate his opposition to the war. Lippman’s stepson, Andrew Lippman, was at MIT and temporarily eligible for a student deferment. Still, the threat of induction should that deferment disappear, as it eventually did, made the risk of U.S. escalation all the more immediate. Finally, there was Richard who, though younger, faced the prospect of choosing between Vietnam or Canada when the war lasted into the 1970s.
“Vietnam was a major issue in our household”, says Lippman. “We talked about it constantly: what would we do if the war continued, what steps Richard or his stepbrother would take if they got drafted. We were all opposed to the war and the draft. We really thought it was immoral”.
For Stallman, the Vietnam War elicited a complex mixture of emotions: confusion, horror, and, ultimately, a profound sense of political impotence. As a kid who could barely cope in the mild authoritarian universe of private school, Stallman experienced a shiver whenever the thought of Army boot camp presented itself.
“I was devastated by the fear, but I couldn’t imagine what to do and didn’t have the guts to go demonstrate”, recalls Stallman, whose March 18th birthday earned him a dreaded low number in the draft lottery when the federal government finally eliminated college deferments in 1971. “I couldn’t envision moving to Canada or Sweden. The idea of getting up by myself and moving somewhere. How could I do that? I didn’t know how to live by myself. I wasn’t the kind of person who felt confident in approaching things like that”.
Stallman says he was both impressed and shamed by the family members who did speak out. Recalling a bumper sticker on his father’s car likening the My Lai massacre to similar Nazi atrocities in World War II, he says he was “excited” by his father’s gesture of outrage. “I admired him for doing it”, Stallman says. “But I didn’t imagine that I could do anything. I was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was going to destroy me”.
Although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, Stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. Like other members of the Science Honors Program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at Columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.[3] Ultimately, Stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. Instead of worshiping the Beatles, girls in Stallman’s age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. To a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like “make love not war” had a taunting quality. Not only was it a reminder that Stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock ’n’ roll, detested drugs, and didn’t participate in campus demonstrations, wasn’t getting it politically; he wasn’t “getting it” sexually either.
“I didn’t like the counter culture much”, Stallman admits. “I didn’t like the music. I didn’t like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn’t like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn’t like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn’t like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn’t imagine a more complicated position, I guess”.
Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman’s own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.
In 1970, Stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations about politics and the Vietnam War as he departed for Harvard. Looking back, Stallman describes the transition from his mother’s Manhattan apartment to life in a Cambridge dorm as an “escape”. Peers who watched Stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience.
“He seemed pretty miserable for the first while at Harvard”, recalls Dan Chess, a classmate in the Science Honors Program who also matriculated at Harvard. “You could tell that human interaction was really difficult for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at Harvard. Harvard was an intensely social kind of place”.
To ease the transition, Stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. Like most members of the Science Honors Program, Stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for Math 55, the legendary “boot camp” class for freshman mathematics “concentrators” at Harvard. Within the class, members of the Science Honors Program formed a durable unit. “We were the math mafia”, says Chess with a laugh. “Harvard was nothing, at least compared with the SHP”.
To earn the right to boast, however, Stallman, Chess, and the other SHP alumni had to get through Math 55. Promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. “It was an amazing class”, says David Harbater, a former “math mafia” member and now a professor of mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students
