The Spring Mobe: April 15, 1967


My First Antiwar Protest

Vietnam '67
By MAURICE ISSERMAN
Clinton, N.Y. — Fifty years ago this spring, on April 15, 1967, a cold, damp Saturday morning, I walked from a friend’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where I’d spent the previous night, toward the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. I was 16, a junior in high school from a small town in eastern Connecticut, and eager to join my first antiwar protest, which had been organized by something called the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (or “Mobe” for short), a recently assembled coalition of radical, pacifist and student groups. This was, in effect, my introduction to “the Sixties,” as well as to antiwar protest, for the decade had as yet barely touched rural Connecticut.
Although this would change in another year or so, in my hometown in the spring of 1967 teenage boys still kept their hair short, girls wore skirts below the knees (both per school requirements), nobody had bell-bottoms, and tie-dye was an unknown concept. And, more important, nobody in my high school or community was vocally opposed to the Vietnam War — except, it seemed, me (my parents had their doubts, but kept them to themselves). Which, up to that Saturday morning, left me feeling a bit lonely in my growing conviction that the war represented a moral disaster and a stain on the national honor. But when I reached the Sheep Meadow, suddenly I found I was lonely no longer.
I knew that public protest against the war had been growing for several years, but such things took place in distant and inaccessible locales like Madison, Wis., and Berkeley, Calif., events that received, at best, grudging and sour attention from the newspapers and magazines available to me in the high school library. One exception that caught my eye had taken place two years before, on April 17, 1965, an antiwar gathering in Washington, D.C., organized by a small campus radical group called Students for a Democratic Society. Apparently much to the surprise of the organizers, some 15,000 or so mostly young antiwar protesters showed up that spring day, which was considered a huge turnout by then prevailing standards.
The New York Times put the story of the march on its front page the following day, complete with a picture of neatly dressed students picketing the White House. The article noted, accurately, that many of those who turned out were newcomers to antiwar protest. The reporter, or perhaps his editor, could not help adding, however, “and some had only a hazy idea of how they might go about ending the fighting in Vietnam.”
Well, O.K., they probably didn’t. But then neither did President Lyndon B. Johnson or Gen. William C. Westmoreland, as they oversaw the dispatch of ever greater numbers of young American soldiers to fight in South Vietnam between 1965 and 1967, with a corresponding sixfold spike in American deaths (1,928 would die in 1965; 11,363 two years later). It seemed increasingly obvious to me that it was the “hazy” ideas of those supposedly well-informed leaders of our country, not those of the nascent antiwar movement, that were the main problem here, since they were getting people killed for no very good reason.
Cut off from any personal involvement in the movement by age and geography, I still felt increasingly drawn to the young protesters, just as I had felt about heroic young civil rights workers earlier in the decade, from the Freedom Rides of 1961 through Freedom Summer of 1964. The movements overlapped in constituencies, style, and leaders — indeed, Bob Moses, organizer of Freedom Summer, had been a keynote speaker at that first S.D.S. march in 1965.
Although active antiwar opposition before 1967 was pretty much restricted to younger Americans and politically marginal groups, a few more distinguished voices were beginning to speak out as well, including the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, who in the spring of 1966 decried the “arrogance of power” on display in the White House and Pentagon and the silence of many of his congressional colleagues. “It is only when the Congress fails to challenge the executive,” Fulbright declared, “when the opposition fails to oppose, when politicians join in a spurious consensus behind controversial policies, that the campuses and streets and public squares of America are likely to become the forums of a direct and disorderly democracy.”
By the spring of 1967 direct and disorderly democracy seemed like a pretty good idea to me.
Not that there was anything particularly disorderly about the gathering I encountered when I finally got to the Sheep Meadow that April morning. I was angry about the war, and had imagined that the dominant sentiment at an antiwar protest would reflect that anger — people would shout and wave fists and chant militant slogans. There was some of that, but the dominant sentiment at that first gathering and at scores of similar events that lay in the movement’s future was a sense of community.
“Alienation” was a big ’60s word — young people were “alienated” from their elders, there was a “generation gap” and so on. If my experience was at all representative, coming together in protest was if anything an antidote to alienation, not an expression or cause for it. When antiwar protesters gathered, I came to feel, we did so not just to express ourselves as dissenters, which is to say, angry outsiders, but in the best interests and representing the best instincts of the nation.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to protesters outside the United Nations.
JACK MANNING / THE NEW YORK TIMES
It was late morning when I got to the Sheep Meadow. People were pouring in from all sides of the park, adding to the vast throng, perhaps as many as several hundred thousand, though estimates varied. Although a predominantly young and white crowd, there were also a fair number of African-Americans in attendance (both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were scheduled to speak at the concluding rally at the United Nations building). A Native American contingent carried signs declaring “Americans — Do Not Do to the Vietnamese What You Did to Us.” And there was also a good representation of older people (the latter, granted, a category that at the time seemed to me to include anyone much over 30). Some of them wore caps identifying them as members, as my father was, of trade unions, and a number of men my father’s age wore overseas caps identifying themselves, as he was, as veterans of World War II. And there was even a small group of men carrying signs identifying themselves as Vietnam veterans against the war — a most welcome addition to our ranks, destined to play an increasingly visible role in such protests in years to come.
The marchers, led by Dr. King, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Benjamin Spock and others, set off from Central Park en route to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the United Nations sometime around noon. Roughly five hours later, in a pouring rain, the last contingents from the park finally reached the site of the afternoon rally. I arrived earlier, in time to hear Dr. King declare that he opposed the war in Vietnam because he loved America. “I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as the moral example of the world.” I was persuaded.
Others were not. The very next day, April 16, Secretary of State Dean Rusk declared on “Meet the Press” that “the Communist apparatus is very busy indeed” in promoting antiwar dissent. The New York Times, for its part, reported on the Spring Mobilization beneath the dismissive headline, “Many Draft Cards Burned — Eggs Tossed at Parade.” The war didn’t end in April 1967, or the next April, for over eight years to come. Tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese would die as a result before the inevitable concluding act was played out in Saigon in the last days of April 1975. Too many Aprils, too many deaths.
By 1968 a small but highly visible minority of mostly youthful protesters, frustrated by the apparent lack of progress in halting the war through large peaceful gatherings, turned to tactics of street confrontations, and in the years that followed, an even smaller cadre turned to bombing campaigns. In the nature of these things, it’s the moments of chaos and violence that provide the most striking images that linger and, to a large extent, shape public memory of antiwar protest. Everybody remembers Chicago in August 1968, with its thousands of protesters. But who remembers Washington in November 1969, with as many as a half-million protesters, possibly the largest antiwar assembly in the country at that point?
The real antiwar movement, as I first encountered it on April 15, 1967, and watched grow in force and influence over the next half-dozen years, was broad and diverse, peaceful and serious, direct and disorderly democracy at its best.

Ken Burns' Vietnam Series Ann Arbor preview

Burns bringing Vietnam to Ann Arbor

FILMMAKER TURNS HIS LENS ON AMERICA'S SHARPEST DIVIDE

Ken Burns spends his professional life immersed in the past, which gives him an acute perspective on America's fractured present. His latest project, a ten-part, 18-hour documentary series for PBS called “The Vietnam War,” just might be a step toward the cure for what ails us.

“We want to be together. We don't like the way we are now,” says the award-winning filmmaker, talking about the current binary nature of America - a coun-
try split into yes/no, red states/blue states, pro-Trump/ anti-Trump, Republicans/ Democrats with precious little middle ground.

“And I believe the way we are now had its beginnings in Vietnam. If we can unpack Vietnam, we may be able to unpack the kind of divisions we have now.”

Burns is returning to his Ann Arbor hometown Wednesday for a special preview of his latest epic documentary. The event will take place at the Michigan Theater and is presented by Detroit Public Television and the Cinetopia Film Festival.

During “Ken Burns: A PBS Preview Event,” the man who's chronicled everything from the Civil War to jazz to Jackie Robinson will show about an hour's worth of excerpts from the Vietnam series. He'll also discuss his six-year journey in making what's bound to be a landmark series and his career as America's most beloved documentary filmmaker.

“The Vietnam War,” directed by Burns and Lynn Novick, will have another local showcase in a couple of months. An excerpt will be premiered at the Cinetopia Festival on June 9 at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The documentary will debut on PBS in the fall.

Burns has won multiple Emmys, received two Oscar nominations and been honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for making some of the most influential and most-watched historical documentaries ever. “More Americans get their history from Ken Burns than any other source,” said the late historian Stephen Ambrose.

Speaking by phone, Burns says his earliest memories of the Vietnam conflict are tied to growing up in southeast Michigan. “I was an 11-yearold living in Ann Arbor when the first teach-in happened about the war in March of 1965.”

It was a painful time personally for Burns. who says his mother was then weeks away from dying. And it was a period of difficult political and cultural shifts that would split American opinion about a devastating war.

In a preview trailer for “The Vietnam War,” the first words spoken by an interview subject are, “I think the Vietnam War drove a stake right into the heart of America...We never recovered.”

Burns promises a look at the divisive war that is “more complex, nuanced” and will cover it comprehensively instead of taking sides.

“I make films for everybody. I am an umpire calling balls and strikes,” he stresses. “We permit, in this film, you to get to know a hundred people, from presidents to so-called ordinary foot soldiers, marines, army guys, helicopter pilots, nurses, gold star mothers, protesters, deserters, but also South Vietnamese civilians and soldiers and diplomats and North Vietnamese civilians and soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas. You get to see the war from every particular angle.”

The documentary also will shed new light on some assumptions that are still taken for fact, despite new information being uncovered. “We've spent the last 45 years learning (new) things that our textbooks and our general conventional wisdom have never caught up with,” says Burns.

One of those complexities is the perception that every U.S. soldier who returned home was yelled at, spit on or otherwise publicly derided by those opposing the war.
While that sort of mistreatment happened to some soldiers, it's not the entire or only story, according to Burns. “Very early on, the anti-war movement would say, 'Bring the GIs home.' That was their banner. They wanted to save them. This is once again where the binary metastasized into this thing that permits false news. There, I said it,” says Burns, alluding to the topic of fake news that's so prevalent today.

Burns has spent a lifetime researching the big picture, which allows him to look at things like fake news in a different way. “It's as old as human beings. The first human being (who) told a lie, that was the first false news there was. ... It's a little bit more insidious now because we have so many outlets and people tend to self-select the news they get.”

He says it's much easier for people to understand that two opposing viewpoints can be valid if they're talking about something personal, like an argument within a marriage, rather than something political.

According to Burns, the divisions that plague us now stretch back to the Vietnam War. And he compares them to a virus that has grown and deepened over the years. “We hope in some ways this series can be a vaccine that might help us unpack and release the toxicity of this, or at least start conversations that realize, you know what? You're both right. And if you're both right, that puts cable news out of business,” he says.

Inevitably, Burns says, his documentaries relate to contemporary life in ways that can't always be anticipated.

“When you begin to tell the story of Vietnam, you do get into large document dumps and you do get into White Houses very upset about leaks. And even though I began this film 10 years ago with no idea what was going to happen now, it seems super- contemporary. I've just listed two of maybe a thousand things (in the documentary where) you'll go, 'Wow, that sounds like today.' ”

Contact Julie Hinds: 313-222-6427 or jhinds@freepress.com.


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FACT SHEET

THE VIETNAM WAR
A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick

Airdate:

Premieres September 2017 on PBS

About the Series:

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides -- Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam.

Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen, digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations. THE VIETNAM WAR features more than 100 iconic musical recordings from greatest artists of the era, and haunting original music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross as well as the Silk Road Ensemble featuring Yo-Yo Ma. 

Production Credits:

THE VIETNAM WAR is a production of Florentine Films and WETA, Washington D.C.  Directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.  Written by Geoffrey C.  Ward.  Produced by Sarah Botstein, Lynn Novick and Ken Burns.

Funding Credits:

Funding provided by: Bank of America; Corporation for Public Broadcasting; PBS; David H. Koch; The Blavatnik Family Foundation; Park Foundation; The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations; The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; National Endowment for the Humanities; The Pew Charitable Trusts; Ford Foundation Just Films; Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and

Members of The Better Angels Society:

Jonathan & Jeannie Lavine, Hal & Diane Brierley, Abrams Foundation, John & Catherine Debs, Fullerton Family Foundation, The Montrone Family, Lynda & Stewart Resnick, The Golkin Family Foundation, The Lynch Foundation, The Roger & Rosemary Enrico, Foundation, Richard S. & Donna L. Strong Foundation, Bonnie and Tom McCloskey, Barbara K. & Cyrus B. Sweet III, The Lavender Butterfly Fund

Engagement:


The film will be accompanied by an unprecedented outreach and public engagement program, providing opportunities for communities to participate in a national conversation about what happened during the Vietnam War, what went wrong and what lessons are to be learned.