(Image source: iStock)

On October 15, 1969, college campuses across the United States participated in the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. At many schools, classes were suspended so faculty could lead teach-ins aimed at raising consciousness about the war that had already claimed the lives of 36,000 American soldiers and 180,000 Vietnamese civilians.

In Washington D.C. over 250,000 marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in protest. In New York City, as the Mets and Orioles prepared to play Game 4 of the World Series, a controversy brewed over whether the flag flying in the outfield of Shea Stadium should be flown at half-staff. NYC Mayor John Lindsay pushed for it; Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn stepped in and overruled.

Meanwhile in the Midwest, on the University of Notre Dame’s campus in South Bend, Indiana, an estimated 2,000 students marched across the vast green quads under canopies of trees with leaves just beginning to yellow.

The march began downtown outside City Hall and wound its way across the Saint Joseph River, which gives South Bend its name (situated as it is at the river’s southern bend), then up a gently sloping hill to the campus, eventually culminating on a long quad in the shadow of the thirteen-story Memorial Library, now known worldwide for its massive mural of Jesus, arms raised, appearing to signal TOUCHDOWN. There, under Jesus’ gaze, an altar had been prepared for Mass.

The Mass was an officially sanctioned event, personally vetted by Notre Dame’s president Father Theodore Hesburgh, and presided over by the former Archbishop of Bombay, T.D. Roberts, an outspoken critic of the war and an advocate for Catholics who felt called to conscientious objection.

As a crowd of several hundred students, faculty, and administrators looked on, including President Hesburgh, Tim MacCarry from New City, New York, a senior at the university and psychology and anthropology major, gave the first reading.

A reading from the Book of Micah:

“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into sickle,” MacCarry read, standing at a lectern to the right of the altar, “one nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again.”

Tim was a “legacy” student—his father graduated from Notre Dame in 1941. Notre Dame then and now reserves a certain number of spots in its incoming first-year class for the children of alumni. The practice, in theory, ensures that the school’s culture carries on across the decades and through times of societal change.

But Tim was not a typical Notre Dame undergraduate. Though a faithful Catholic and an exceptional student, he was no great respecter of authority or tradition for tradition’s sake. According to Tim’s younger brother, Noel, before arriving at Notre Dame Tim somehow found time outside of his high school responsibilities to publish an underground newspaper that criticized U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which got him into “some trouble.”

On top of all this, and rather uncommon for Notre Dame legacies, Tim did not like sports, including football, which was ironic considering that in the fall of 1966—when he first stepped foot on campus, a year into the ground war in Vietnam—all anyone could talk about was Notre Dame’s football team. They went undefeated, rose to number one in the polls, and were crowned National Champions.

But on that sunny October day, half-way through his senior year, nearly four years into the Vietnam War, Tim was at the center of the protests he had read about, and he was about to take the first step across a threshold into an entirely other kind of trouble, a step that would eventually lead to his death a year and a half later.

On March 18, 1971, Tim was found dead from a single gunshot wound to the head at the corner of Cypress and St. Gertrude Place in Santa Ana, California. Beside his body was a .22 rifle he purchased earlier that day. The receipt was still in his pocket.

The autopsy found no drugs or alcohol in his system, and there were no other signs of trauma on his body, though they did find, written on his arm, two phone numbers: one was his parents’ number, though it was off slightly by two digits, and the other was that of close friends.

A brief police investigation concluded that the cause of death was suicide. He was 22 years old.

Telling the story of Tim MacCarry’s short life is fraught for many reasons, most of which are due to the fact that those who knew him refuse to believe he killed himself, but also because his life raises crucial questions about the complicity of colleges and universities in prosecution of wars and the death of innocents around the world. And that story is one that continues today.

***

At the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam Mass on Notre Dame’s campus, four students and two faculty members stepped from the crowd and approached the altar where one by one they tore their draft cards into pieces and placed them at the feet of the priests assembled on the dais.

The ripping-up of the draft cards was a shocking show of resistance—destroying draft cards was a federal offense. That moment, and other poignant scenes from that day, were captured by Jim Gabriel, a senior from Bridgeport, MA, in a short film titled Autumn War.

In the short film, Tim MacCarry first appears at the 1:38 mark standing at a microphone in a tweed sport coat addressing a huge crowd just before the Mass. The film has no sound, only a choral soundtrack, the “Credo” from a 1965 Congolese setting of the Latin Mass: We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

According to an article in the student newspaper, The Observer, the “thesis” of Tim’s speech was that the war in Vietnam was yet another instance of colonial powers using violence to subdue an entire nation’s native population in order to extract its wealth.

Later, at the 3:22 mark, we see Tim walking arm-in-arm with others who were planning to tear up their draft cards. Tim is in the middle, wearing a red sweater vest. To his far left, our right, is Professor Jim Douglass, a new faculty member who had been hired to teach seminar courses in a newly founded Program for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence.

(Scene from August War featuring Tim MacCarry)

The program was the first of its kind in the country, and its founding made national news that fall, garnering articles in over one hundred newspapers from coast to coast. The Pittsburgh Press reported “‘Peace Class’ Sellout With Fighting Irish”; The Flint Michigan Journal reported, “Notre Dame Students Flock to Join Nonviolence Course.”

What began as one, twenty-student seminar taught by Professor Emmanuel Charles McCarthy, the founder of the Nonviolence Program, had to be expanded to four sections with no seat limit, as more than 250 students signed up.

Notre Dame’s president, Fr. Hesburgh, worked closely with McCarthy and a group of student leaders—including every captain of every varsity sports team—to secure a $100,000 gift from Gulf Western Oil to fund the program. In the official press release announcing Gulf Western’s gift, Hesburgh is quoted saying the seminar will “explore the literature of violence and nonviolence, investigate the psychology of human aggression and study the social effects of violence as portrayed in mass media.”

With money in hand, and demand for seats high, McCarthy set about hiring someone to help him teach the classes. In an interview with McCarthy, now an ordained priest in the Melkite-Byzantine Church, he told me that Jim Douglass was the natural choice. Jim had been teaching at the University of Hawaii, where he was a professor of religion and taught a course on the theology of non-violence. His first book The Non-Violent Cross: A Theology of Revolution and Peace had just been published to acclaim beyond the academy.

Tim MacCarry was a student in one of Jim’s nonviolence seminars. In a phone interview with Jim from his home in Birmingham, AL, where he runs a Catholic Worker house of hospitality with his wife, Shelley, he reminisced about Tim: “He was so far ahead of everyone—He was decades ahead of me…Tim would have been 21. I was 33.”

Jim is now 87. Since that one (and only) year at Notre Dame—he was fired after another student protest one month after the Moratorium Mass resulted in the expulsion of 10 students—Jim has thought a lot about Tim’s death, and he doesn’t believe for a second that Tim killed himself. He is not alone in that conviction. Jim believes Tim was assassinated, taken out because he was on a path to becoming a charismatic, Che Guevara-style revolutionary, capable of attracting many followers.

Each person I interviewed spoke highly of Tim: he was devastatingly intelligent, a natural leader, and he cared deeply about the poor and oppressed, so much so that he was outraged at what he found at Notre Dame. He looked to his professors and the administrators, who were mostly priests, to take action on the big questions of the day—how to end the war in Vietnam, how to change society so the poor were no longer exploited—but what he found was not only silence but outright hypocrisy.

Notre Dame’s student body in the mid-1960s was conservative, made up predominantly of young white men who had been raised in Catholic households on a steady diet of strict obedience to the church, love of country, and a deep-seated anti-communism. “God, Country, Notre Dame” reads the inscription over the east door of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, the door closest to the Main Building, famous for its gilded Golden Dome—a motto lived out by the ROTC program at Notre Dame, one of only a dozen in the country that offered for-credit course work and training in all three military branches. At the outbreak of the war, the program enrolled close to 1,600 students—a little over 20% of the student body.

A month after the Mortarium Mass, on November 18, in the third-floor hallway of the Dome, dozens of students laid down on the floor in an attempt to block classmates from recruitment appointments with the CIA and Dow Chemical, manufacturer of Napalm and Agent Orange. The students were asked to move, but they refused. They were given a fifteen-minute warning, and told that if they did not desist from blocking their classmates’ path that they would be subject to expulsion.

That afternoon, according to The Observer, Tim addressed the crowd of students inside the Dome—some protesting, others just there for the spectacle—calling out the school for hosting the CIA and Dow: “[Notre Dame is a] functional digestive tract fed by the foundations and tax grants to shit out agents to keep the VICIOUS beast stalking the world.”

Notre Dame did not expel Tim, but the school did suspend or expel ten other students who refused to move, daring their classmates to walk on them to enter the interview rooms. This was the beginning of the end of the Nonviolence Program. Charlie McCarthy, who had worked so hard to launch the program, later resigned in protest, saying in a lecture to students that he no longer believed Notre Dame was a Christian university: “Notre Dame has reached a stage where it is not Christian and no different from Michigan State.”

Though Tim’s public comments were often inflammatory and seen by many of his classmates as self-righteous, McCarthy and Douglass believed he was in search of community and co-conspirators who were committed to the same struggle. During his junior year, Tim had lived at St. Francis House, a gathering place for local South Bend progressives with ties to the Socialist organization Students for a Democratic Society. There he helped to host Friday night meetings on topics ranging from women’s liberation to “Christ and the Status Quo.”

According to his girlfriend Charlotte Casey, who was also involved in the progressive political resistance in South Bend, Tim was always trying to think of ways to engage the less privileged in their protests. He questioned why Notre Dame hourly staff were not allowed to observe the campus-wide strike in the spring of 1970 to protest the invasion of Cambodia. He criticized the institution’s compensation for hourly employees. He wrote columns for The Observer alleging corporate influence on universities, as well as eyewitness accounts of campus protests for Dorothy Day’s The Catholic Worker. He even visited the Catholic Worker Farm in Tivoli, New York, where he met Day and left, according to a letter she sent to Tim’s father after his passing, a deep and lasting impression on her. “[N]o one can accept the coroner’s ruling of a ‘suicide,’” Day wrote.

In 1970, despite Tim’s relentless agitating and political organizing, he graduated magna cum laude. But he was prevented from participating in his class’s commencement exercises for suspicion of distributing a radical political zine on campus.

That summer, before heading off to California to begin a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California, Irvine, Tim went to Cuba under the auspices of the Venceremos Brigade, a volunteer program founded by the Students for a Democratic Society, whose mission was to show solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. While in Cuba he worked on a banana plantation and met members of the Revolutionary Union (RU), a Marxist group based in the Bay Area.

Tim was “impressed” by the RU, according to Charlotte, who wrote back and forth to Tim that summer. When he moved to Orange County that fall to begin graduate studies, he founded an anti-imperialist collective that participated in political actions, including the August 1970 Chicano Moratorium to protest the war in Vietnam, during which Los Angeles Times reporter Rubén Salazar was killed. Tim was wounded by a ricocheting shotgun pellet.

It is that summer in Cuba that everyone I spoke with points to with concern. From the handful of letters Charlotte kept, we know Tim was disappointed in the “bourgeois” priests he met, and their lack of solidarity with the Cuban people. According to his brother Noel, when Tim returned from Cuba something began to “feel off.” His disillusionment with the church and its willingness to support the oppressed had deepened. His thoughts became more Maoist, leaning toward the teachings of Chinese revolutionary Mao Zedong, who theorized that the only way to overthrow an oppressive capitalist system was through an armed insurgency.

It seemed to Noel that Tim was on the verge of a crisis of faith: perhaps nonviolent protest was not sufficient to end the war. Noel recalls that it was not until that last Christmas, December of 1970, three months before Tim died, that their mother finally confronted Tim. She said, “he was just too gentle of a soul to embrace [such beliefs].”

That was the last time Noel saw Tim.

Fr. McCarthy, now 87, tells me that despite the university hosting a 40th and 50th anniversary of the student expulsions, in which the expelled students—now known as the Notre Dame Ten—were invited back to pray, celebrate Mass, and tell their stories to new generations of students, Tim’s death still feels unresolved.

“His empathetic energies were in the right place,” McCarthy told me during a recent phone call. “[They were] with the poor. But I would say that for some reason or another he just did not find what he needed spiritually at Notre Dame. To my mind, as I talked to him—knew him—he was searching gallantly for ways to rectify the human situation…He was all over the place, but I never thought of suicide.”

***

Tim’s unresolved story now resonates with another generation’s war—last spring’s student protests against Israel’s war in Gaza. While Notre Dame’s campus did not see the large tent encampments of students and violent police standoffs like at Columbia or UCLA, seventeen Notre Dame students were arrested on May 2, 2024 outside the Golden Dome for misdemeanor trespassing, resisting law enforcement, and refusing to leave private property.

Several of the students currently facing charges, who asked not to be identified for fear that speaking on the record could jeopardize their cases, told me in interviews that they were arrested after waiting several hours in the rain in the hopes of speaking with university Provost, John McGreevy. They received word through a faculty member that a meeting with the Provost might be possible. And so, they waited. They wanted to deliver their demands in person: make public Notre Dame’s investments in military contractors and divest from any support for Israel.

The rain continued to fall. Police appeared nearby but did not engage. Finally, McGreevy and Scott Appelby, the Dean of the School for Global Affairs and former director of the Kroc Center for International Peace Studies, arrived. What followed was, by all accounts, a terse and unproductive conversation. The campus leaders departed, and the police officers approached, giving the students a warning: disperse or be arrested. The protestors talked among themselves. Some were international students. Being arrested could jeopardize their visas, and so they stepped aside. The seventeen who remained sat on the ground, locked arms, and began, for the first time, to chant: “Free, Free Palestine. Free, Free, Free Palestine,” and then, “No justice, no peace,” over and over again while being arrested.

Notre Dame Faculty member Mahan Mirza, director of the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion and teaching professor of Islam and science in the Keough School of Global Affairs, witnessed the exchange between the student protesters and the campus leaders. In a letter to the editor published in the May 4 issue of The Observer, Mirza reveals that he was the one who offered to broker a conversation between the students and university leaders. He wrote:

“The fluid and rapidly evolving situation got the better of us. As a result, the “rain-soaked summit” fell far short of expectations. It was not constructive. One deemed the other side immature, the other dismissive. Where do we go from here?”

I asked Fr. McCarthy this same question, and what he would say to these seventeen arrested students:

“I would tell them your basic Christianity is correct—you are thinking in terms of the Gospel. What’s going on in Gaza deserves total condemnation, and not just because Jesus said it, but the question is how do you witness so that other people can see [the injustice], too? Witnessing such that others cannot see is no good. Unless you do serious education in Gospel informed non-violence, you’re not going to make a dent.”

This is what Tim worried over: how to make a dent; how to protect the weak; how to defeat the war machine. Whether he changed the minds of anyone outside his small circle is hard to say, but the story of those months in the fall of 1969 into the spring of 1970 has now, fifty-five years later, become more than just campus lore, but an exemplar.

One student who was arrested for protesting the war in Gaza, who gave me permission to use their words verbatim, told me that in the moments just before they were lifted to their feet and handcuffed, they recalled watching a documentary about the life and legacy of Fr. Hesburgh, who died in 2015 at the age of 97. They watched it in the Moreau Seminar, a two-semester course required of all Notre Dame first-year students that introduces them to the school’s history and engages them in “conversations that matter.” The documentary focuses on Hesburgh’s work on JFK’s Civil Rights Commission, his staunch defense of academic freedom, even in the face of pressure from the Vatican, and the difficult decisions he had to make in the fall of 1969.

The student recalled their instructor asking the class, “If this were to happen, and you had been a student at this time, what would you have done? And most of the class said, We would have been involved. We would have been bold and courageous, and we would have stood up against injustice. I thought about that moment right before my potential arrest.”

The student continued: “I don’t regret [being arrested] and I will never regret staying on that grass. That’s showing up and saying, I believe we need to talk about Notre Dame’s complicity not just in Gaza but in the rest of the world.”

When the student woke the next morning, they saw the handcuff marks on their wrist and sat in shock for a moment. They couldn’t believe they had been arrested for trespassing on campus, a place they felt they belonged, where they were part of a “family.” The student told me, “[At other universities] there’s not that perception—it’s just going to school—but here you’re joining a family, and then to feel that your family has left you, and not just left you, but won’t listen to you when you need them the most is really hard.”

***

Like Jim Douglass, Charlotte Casey, and Dorothy Day, Fr. McCarthy finds it hard to believe that Tim killed himself. The Tim they knew had been shaped more by the Beatitudes of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—blessed are the poor in the spirit; blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice; blessed are the peacemakers—than the violent proclamations of Mao.

In the last moments of our interview, he said: “Tim was killed because he had a heart and mind too open, not only to the suffering of the world, but to the causes of the world…It’s just a tragic, tragic thing.”

Even Fr. Hesburgh, in his 1991 New York Times best-selling autobiography, God, Country, Notre Dame, devotes nearly three pages to “my friend Tim”—his last name not given. Hesburgh writes, “I admired him because he practiced what he preached. He had the courage of his convictions.”

And then, whether out of a priestly sense of mercy, or because of his own strong conviction, Hesburgh closes: “We were told that he committed suicide, though I found that hard to believe. In fact, I don’t believe it still.”

David Griffith is the author of A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press). His essays and reviews have been published in print and online at The Paris Review, Killing the Buddha, Image, The New England Review, and elsewhere. He is at work on a book about the life and times of Tim MacCarry and a redress of Flannery O’Connor.