Donald Kalish; Professor, Foreign Policy Critic

Donald Kalish, UCLA professor of philosophy and indefatigable critic of U.S. foreign policy in countries from Southeast Asia to Central America, has died. He was 80.

Kalish, who led many student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, died June 8 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a long illness, according to UCLA spokesman Harlan Lebo.

Highly respected for his work as professor and, from 1964 to 1970, as chairman of the UCLA Philosophy Department, Kalish was far better known, both locally and nationally, for his efforts to end the war in Vietnam and later to oppose U.S. involvement in Nicaragua, Grenada and elsewhere.

One of Southern California’s earliest high-profile critics of the Vietnam fighting, Kalish as vice chairman of the Peace Action Council was co-organizer of a historic demonstration at the Century Plaza Hotel on June 23, 1967. About 80 antiwar organizations mustered 10,000 protesters to march while President Johnson was speaking in the hotel.

But radical elements--stirred up by a communist agitator whom Kalish had unwittingly let into the group--violated the keep-moving requirement of the parade permit and sat down, refusing to budge. Police tried to oust them, setting off one of the first and largest of several confrontations between police and demonstrators over the next troubled years.

Kalish was again chief organizer of a sort of five-year anniversary demonstration in October 1972 when President Nixon was speaking at the Century Plaza Hotel. That time, Kalish held several planning sessions with police before the march, and the 10,000 protesters who turned out conducted what police praised as one of the best-disciplined large marches in city history.

Kalish’s anti-Vietnam War protests extended to bailing out protesters who were arrested and to reducing by about 25% the amount he personally paid in income taxes--a figure he calculated as the proportion being used to finance the war effort in Southeast Asia.

“I am not a pacifist,” he told The Times when he announced the tax crusade in 1967. “Therefore I will not withhold the amount that goes into armament. I am not opposed to war in general and I am certainly not opposed to defense of our country against aggression.

“I am not a starry-eyed idealist,” he said. “I am doing this because I think it is my moral obligation. My purpose is . . . to manifest to the American people that a group of middle-class, secure people are so dissatisfied as to take such action.”

In the midst of Vietnam protests, Kalish received brickbats from then Gov. Reagan and other conservatives for his work on campus, where he is credited by academics with bringing top philosophers into the UCLA faculty. He was instrumental in hiring Angela Davis as one of his department’s professors in 1969. She never got the chance to teach, however, because the UC Board of Regents, with Reagan as a very active member, fired her under a 1940 UC policy against employing communists.

Kalish’s self-appointed oversight of foreign policy did not end with the Vietnam War.

In 1983, when U.S. troops were sent to Grenada, Kalish protested in a letter to The Times: “The invasion of Grenada violates international law. As a signer of the charters of both the United Nations and the Organization of American States, the United States has agreed not to intervene directly or indirectly for whatever purpose in the sovereign nations of the Western Hemisphere. We are deeply offended by . . . the fact that President Reagan has broken international law. . . . “

Kalish wrote the letter on behalf of the Concerned Faculty of UCLA, which he headed and had reconstituted from his old University Committee on Vietnam when Reagan took office in 1981.

Kalish and his group also opposed Reagan’s Central American policies in the mid-1980s and organized a teach-in on the subject in 1984. But the times had changed, and so had students.

Admitting he felt “depressed” by the low turnout, Kalish told The Times then: “We have not yet found the mechanism to bring out the uninformed and the uncommitted. We’ve spoken mainly to ourselves. My impression is that students are not receptive to anything that doesn’t concern their immediate lives.”

Born in Chicago, Kalish earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology and his doctorate in philosophy at UC Berkeley. After teaching briefly at Swarthmore College and UC Berkeley, he joined the UCLA faculty in 1949. He began a phased retirement in 1980 and officially retired in 1990, but returned periodically to teach his class in introductory logic through 1997.

Kalish was noted for helping to create UCLA’s program in logic and semantics, which earned the philosophy department its first national recognition.

“An inspiring and sparkling teacher who brought excitement and a sense of community to the classroom, Don brought scores of students to love and appreciate the subject,” philosophy professor David Kaplan said Wednesday. “Students cite his courses and his influence in general as a turning point in their academic careers.”

One of UCLA’s most popular professors, known for his boyish enthusiasm for teaching, Kalish once said: “There is something about teaching philosophy at UCLA that keeps one young. Although I’ll never see 40 again, on better days I rather like to think of myself as a boy of promise.”

Kalish was the co-author of “The Logic Techniques of Formal Reasoning,” a widely used textbook that, according to his UCLA colleagues, is considered “the most elegant and rigorous textbook presenting symbolic logic.”

The professor and activist, who instructed that no services be conducted, is survived by his wife, the former Ann Graham.