County residents watching the PBS Documentary, “The Movement and the Madman” last Tuesday may have caught a familiar name towards the end. Dr. Mary (Munchel) Posner, a Rockport-based psychologist, was featured toward the end of the broadcast to discuss her role in Indiana’s contribution to the peace movement against the Vietnam War. Then, much as now, Mary served as a voice for those in the Heartland who defied the popular image of Nixon’s “Silent Majority” as well as the conventional image of an anti-war protester in the national media.
The documentary can be viewed at www.pbs.org until April 25. It is an episode of the American Experience series.
The unique experience of participating in a major documentary about one’s role in history was novel for Mary. Filming took place during the start of the pandemic, proving a hindrance to the traditional practice of interspersing in-person interviews with decades-old archival footage. Instead, most of production is placed firmly in its time period, and subjects interviewed were shown as they appeared at the time, or thereabouts. Mary, for example, was shown as she was as a senior in high school, though her contributions to the peace movement would not begin until well into her studies at Ball State.
In fact, Mary never quite got the full sit-down interview experience. Her interview was recorded by Larry Peter at Power Plant Productions in Tell City, where her contribution was recorded remotely in accordance with pandemic-era restrictions.
“It was so incredible to see the documentary and go back to those days and kind of live through it again,” said Mary.“ I think the lack of current in-person interview turned out to be a blessing. All the pictures and film footage were of us back in the day.”
PBS was not the first time Mary found herself on national television. In 1970, she appeared as the focal point to an NBC report on anti-war activism outside the major cities of the country. NBC’s viewers may have been puzzled to find that Mary’s upbringing was quite conventional.
Born and raised in a Catholic family, she attended Ball State to major in English, with the goal of becoming a high school teacher. Had she been born at another time, that may have been exactly and only what happened, but it wasn’t to be.
Activism did not come naturally to Mary, and Muncie was not exactly a hotbed of anti-establishment sentiment. While modern technology allows one to quickly receive word of any given event, from any number of sources with a deluge of opinions only a click away, there were few alternatives to the mainstream news of that time.
“I really wasn’t paying that much attention to national affairs,” Mary said. “Nowadays students have their own televisions and 24/7 access to news. We didn’t have that back then.”
However, there were several committed “underground newspapers” in operation across the country, especially on college campuses but also among soldiers deployed to Vietnam. In fact, Mary’s first brush with her future husband, Lou Posner, came through this underground network.
“He was against the war, as many soldiers were, and he wrote an article against the war that he sent to a professor at Ball State,” Mary said. “I was the secretary for that professor and I typed it and it was printed in the underground newspaper.”
Ball State’s underground newspaper was not particularly popular with the university’s administration, its own official student newspaper or the surrounding community. Nevertheless, a committed group of students kept the paper published, printed and distributed through much of the war years. Eventually, this paper ran an article and a photo showing the aftermath of a napalm attack. Mary recalled that when she saw that photo, she knew we had to end the war in Vietnam.
As a member of the student senate, Mary attended the National Student Association’s 1969 meeting in El Paso, Texas. While there, she ran into an old high school classmate from Marian College involved with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, and was encouraged to join.
When she returned to Ball State in September, Mary realized there was no local chapter. She tried to encourage someone, anyone else to start one and lead it, but failing that decided to do so herself. So it was that Mary became the leader of 20 to 30 anti-war students, faced with catching up to the national movement’s planned activities leading up to the October 15 launch date.
To say the Ball State Chapter’s reception was cold would be an understatement. Mary may have fretted about the truncated timetable and limited amount of committed support, but supporters of the war took umbrage at the very existence of the chapter, no matter how small.
The university’s official newspaper, Ball State Daily News, wrote an editorial against Mary and her fellows. While several professors offered support, the wider community aligned heavily against the committee. Even the student government, a traditional organizational base for activism on many campuses around the country, shot down Mary’s attempts to have the movement recognized.
“At a lot of universities, the student government was behind the anti-war movement,” she said. “But they totally rejected a motion to support the Vietnam Moratorium Committee twice.”
Competing student movements in support of the war, or at least the powers that be, drew more supporters. A petition by student group, Project Faith, collected a huge number of signatures showing support for President Richard Nixon, arguing that he knew more than the students about the situation abroad. It would have been a very lonely existence, were it not for the presence of one very committed, very organized, and well-established partner.
“We didn’t have very many people on our side,” recalled Mary. “Except for one outstanding example, the Catholic Church.”
The campus’ Catholic organization offered the only formal local support for anti-war activities the group would ever see. In fact, it was a Catholic priest who provided transportation for Mary and her fellow students when their activities eventually took them to Washington D.C.
The Muncie protesters did not make many new friends once their activities began in earnest. In tandem with marches across the country, Mary and her fellows demonstrated on the steps of the campus administration building, where they read the names of all the American servicemen and women killed in the war up to that point.
“That drew incredible criticism from people who were for the war,” she said. “They thought we were dishonoring the war dead, but our view was that we were honoring them.”
Activities continued over the next several months, and however small the Muncie group was, the umbrage it generated eventually drew national attention. As the Muncie group’s leader, Mary suddenly became a lightning rod for the entire national debate in February of 1970. NBC’s Dean Brelis made her the focus of a special report on the anti-war movement in Muncie and the considerable opposition of the rest of the city.
“The moratorium group at Ball State University was small, and it had little support,” Brelis informed the nation. “But Muncie tried to fight these young people, most of them from middle class or conservative families.”
Mary, then 20 years old, was faced with the task of defending her group, and by proxy an entire national movement.
“I guess if you consider the context of this community, yes I am a revolutionary,” Mary told NBC. “If you’re for peace nowadays that makes you a revolutionary and I think it’s a sad time in our society that that is a revolutionary idea, but it seems to be.”
The NBC report noted that several times throughout November and December of 1969, the Muncie anti-war group asked permission to hold demonstrations in front of the courthouse. However, a local veterans group supporting the war always had that spot booked for “patriotic ceremonies.”
Suspicion grew that no anti-war group could ever use the plaza for a demonstration, but in December the group did find an opening for a demonstration. However, they were joined by their opposite numbers among pro-war veterans.
According to reports, protesters carried a casket filled with the names of the war dead, while veterans staged 21-gun salutes at 10-minute intervals to drown out the protesters’ voices.
“You’re putting the names of the war dead in the casket and you keep hearing those guns, it kind of brings it even more to life,” Mary recalled. “Those guns can kill.”
The entire segment is available on Youtube under the title: “1970 NBC News report on Ball State’s Vietnam Moratorium Committee”.
In mid January of 1970, the Muncie group joined a Black congregation for a church service in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., a prominent war critic murdered just under two years prior. In February, the Muncie protesters joined others in Indianapolis to protest a visit from President Nixon. Efforts in Indianapolis were frustrated by a well orchestrated effort to mute and isolate anti-war voices. Buses were aligned to keep the protesters out of sight, and the Arlington High School Band kept any voices from penetrating the president’s bubble.
In April of 1970, Mary got a chance to meet Sam Brown, the national coordinator for the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. Brown came to Muncie to speak at the plaza. The national committee disbanded after April, and Mary’s tenure at the helm of the local chapter ended with it. Protests sparked back up in May following Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, but Mary began to focus more on her own life thereafter.
Going into her last year at Ball State, Mary recognized she had missed out on a lot of the standard college experience. There was little time for friends and parties between studying, work and organizing a heavily out-gunned movement. So, she focused on wrapping up her studies and beginning the next chapter of her life.
As fate would have it, Lou came back from Vietnam and paid Ball State a visit. Mary, who had transcribed his article at the start of her activist life, finally met the author and ultimately married him.
After Mary graduated, the couple moved to Wisconsin. Lou joined other anti-war veterans and continued his own activism. Mary, for her part, found that teaching positions were rather hard to come by.
“Ironically, during the Vietnam War a lot of people wanted to be teachers because that was a possible way to avoid going to Vietnam,” she said.
However, Mary had picked up a passion for psychology along the way, reading several books and volunteering time for suicide hotlines. She attended Indiana University and earned a doctorate in psychology. While in Bloomington, she and Lou led the Monroe County Committee for the Impeachment of the President, with Mary even engaging in a televised debate on the matter.
While the peace movement’s longtime nemesis did resign from the presidency in 1974, followed less than a year later by end of the war, that vindication was more of a relief than a triumph for Mary. Looking back, she finds it hard to find any point at which it looked like the movement was going anywhere.
“It didn’t feel like we were making a difference,” she said. “Nixon maintained that he had ignored the whole thing, and then he got re-elected, so that was pretty discouraging.”
The PBS documentary asserts that protest movements, even small ones like Mary’s, did have an impact, however. The documentary posits that Nixon was very concerned with the peace movement, noting that it had laid low his predecessor. It also asserts that public opposition kept in check his strategy of bluffing the North Vietnamese into surrender with threats of overwhelming force, potentially including nuclear weapons.
Mary has continued to engage in activism, at least when she’s not in her Rockport office. While modern technology has certainly made it easier to organize, it’s also become harder to sift through fact and fiction, and easier to become a target. While proud of the younger generation’s efforts thus far, she noted that activism has gotten harder, if anything. Mary noted that secondary education has become more expensive, forcing students to focus more on grades and work. The other prevalent stresses of the day, such as the threat of school shootings, also mark a different environment from her youth.
Still, Mary sees a lot of potential in the young leaders who have arisen so far, even if the world is unlikely to be any more receptive to their hopes than it was for hers.
“The country was very polarized back when I was in college and it’s more polarized now,” she said. “They really have their work cut out for them.”
Mary also said the issues facing today’s youth are in many ways much more pressing, particularly in the realm of the global effort to mitigate climate change.
Sometimes even a successful movement doesn’t feel that way when the trumpets fade. Mary pointed out that in addition to the 58,220 of her countrymen to die in the war, the Vietnamese tally is immensely higher, and still growing. Unexploded ordnance, hereditary ailments from chemical exposure, and other threats continue to end lives half a century later.
“But no matter how great the challenge, this important documentary shows that one person can make a difference, and we have to keep trying,” Mary said. “As Cora Weiss said in the last lines of the documentary, “Never give up… We didn’t give up until it was over.”’
Story by Don Steen.
 Posner, a Rockport-based psychologist, was featured toward the end of the broadcast to discuss her role in Indiana’s contribution to the peace movement against the Vietnam War.){kind=link}