The Flower in the Gun Barrel
By MAURICE ISSERMAN October 19, 2007
Toward dusk on the evening of October 21, 1967, a burly federal marshal took hold of my feet, dragged me away from the plaza in front of the Pentagon where I had been sitting in, and pulled me down the adjacent embankment, before depositing me on the pavement of the building's north parking lot. I was then 16 years old, a high-school junior from a small town in Connecticut on my first trip to the nation's capital. I picked myself up — bruised, dusty, and choking from tear gas — and limped back across the bridge connecting Arlington, Va., to Washington.
All in all, I thought, it had been the best day of my life.
It was probably not the best day in the life of Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara — but then, it had been quite some time sinnce he had had a good one. Over the previous several years, he had grown increasingly tormented by his responsibility for the war that I had come to Washington to protest. Alone in his office, he would break down and weep, turning his face to the window if someone walked in unexpectedly. Five months before the Pentagon protest, he had sent the White House a confidential memo outlining his "growing doubts" about American involvement in Vietnam. He was having a bad day on October 21 because he no longer believed in the war he had done so much to begin and promote — and with which he is forever identified.
So it was, 40 years ago this month, while I was going bump-bump-bump down the embankment, that a secretary of defense famed for his uncompromising public defense of American policies in Vietnam found himself in the odd position of plotting strategy for the movement opposing those policies. Three decades later, writing in In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Times Books, 1995), McNamara recalled the siege of the Pentagon: "I could not help but think that had the protesters been more disciplined — Gandhi-like--” they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down."
The Pentagon protest was viewed at the time, as it has been subsequently, as a watershed in the history of the antiwar movement. Until then, with few exceptions, antiwar protests had been fairly staid affairs — mostly orderly marches, picketing, and vigils. But the organizers of the October 21 protest had billed it as the moment when the antiwar movement would shift "from dissent to resistance." After a mass rally at the Lincoln Memorial and a march across the Arlington Memorial Bridge — both securely within the "dissent" tradition — the "resistance" component kicked in, as thousands of marchers brought the antiwar message to the very steps of the Pentagon. Seven hundred were arrested, a record for antiwar protests at that time.
To some critics, then and later, "resistance" was a code word and license for irresponsible and obnoxious behavior. "It is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants," The New York Times's James Reston wrote in a front-page piece on October 23. "They spat on some of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander." But that is not how I remember it. I returned home from Washington thinking we had been pretty true to Gandhian principles as we sat in below McNamara's office window.
The October 1967 protest was organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, headed by the veteran pacifist David Dellinger. The previous summer, Dellinger had hired the Berkeley activist Jerry Rubin to serve as principal organizer for the group's already scheduled fall demonstration. It was Rubin's idea to abandon the original plans, which called for a march past the Capitol, and substitute a march crossing the Arlington Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon.
Rubin was hardly a pacifist and was later associated with the chaotic street actions outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. But his inspiration for the Pentagon protest came largely from pacifist sources. On three earlier occasions in the 1960s, small groups of demonstrators from peace groups like the Committee for Non-Violent Action had staged vigils and sit-ins at the Pentagon, some lasting for several days. And in a desperate act of individual protest, Norman R. Morrison, a Quaker, sat down outside the Pentagon on November 2, 1965, doused himself with kerosene, lit a match, and burned to death.
As Rubin planned this latest Pentagon protest, he also drew inspiration from an article by Allen Ginsberg titled "Berkeley Vietnam Days," published in the pacifist magazine Liberation. Ginsberg called upon the antiwar movement to embrace a "magic politics" of playful protest and spectacle. Rubin and his sidekick Abbie Hoffman set out to create just such a spectacle in Washington. Word went out to hippie communities that the event would be as much a festival of the counterculture as a traditional protest. There would be rock bands, giant puppets, even an attempt to levitate the Pentagon and shake out its demons. In The Armies of the Night (New American Library, 1968), a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Pentagon protest, Norman Mailer described the eccentric couture of his fellow demonstrators at length, suggesting that "They were close to being assembled from all the intersections between history and the comic books, between legend and television, the Biblical archetypes and the movies."
The countercultural trappings were new. But there was nothing new — or, for that matter, necessarily un-Gandhi-like — in the theatricality of the Pentagon protest. Indeed, American pacifists had spent a decade crafting a politics of spectacle, starting in 1958, when three Quakers and a Methodist attempted to sail a small boat, named the Golden Rule, into an off-limits zone in the Pacific to disrupt a scheduled hydrogen-bomb test. The civil-rights movement of the early 1960s also displayed a flair for theatrical confrontation, offering a morally charged drama of redemptive suffering carried out at lunch counters, on courthouse steps, and in crowded jail cells across the South.
So there were precedents for thinking that carefully choreographed political confrontations between forces (and symbols) of right and wrong, good and evil, could have practical and desirable consequences. That was the background that shaped Rubin's strategy.
Things did not go according to plan (a topic sentence that could serve to introduce a paragraph devoted to virtually any major protest of the 1960s). The civil disobedience was supposed to be an orderly crossing of a police line by those inclined to accept arrest. The remainder of the protesters would have to content themselves with standing within shouting (or levitating) distance of the Pentagon. No one expected that, with thousands of soldiers and hundreds of marshals guarding the perimeter, protesters would find a weak point in the line, an unguarded section on the embankment that led to the very steps of the Pentagon. A vanguard of a dozen or so protesters actually made it into the building before being beaten bloodily back. In the meantime, about 5,000 protesters poured up the embankment before a secure line was restored behind them.
There was, I recall, a scary sense of indeterminacy in those first few minutes above the embankment. Blood had already been spilled on the Pentagon steps. No one knew how the troops who poured out of the building would react to our presence, or whether they had bullets in their guns. There was some pushing and jostling, and a few missiles tossed from the back of the crowd toward the line of troops. But one young protester found a way to defuse tensions. Bernie Boston, a photographer at The Washington Star, snapped a photograph of the young man putting carnations in a soldier's gun barrel. (Boston's editors apparently didn't think much of the photo, running it on Page A12 the next day. It went on to become one of the iconic images of the 60s.)
John Patterson, a member of a military-police battalion from Fort Bragg, N.C., who took up a position outside the Pentagon that afternoon, offers a perspective from the other end of the gun barrel. "There was some stuff, bottles, etc., thrown in the first few minutes after we took our position on the steps," he wrote me recently in an e-mail message in response to my query about his experiences that day. "But nobody was hurt, and it quickly stopped." It stopped in part because the protesters themselves were yell-ing at the missile throwers at the back of the crowd to cut it out.
And, contrary to Reston's influential account in the Times, Patterson did not recall any spitting by protesters. At my request, he checked his memories with other veterans of his unit. "So far, I've heard from 4 MP's who were at the Pentagon in 67," he reported in another e-mail message. "None of them recall seeing or hearing about anybody being spit on. One MP ... whom I spent considerable time with on the line, described the protesters as friendly and peaceful ... As another said, 'If one of our guys had been spit on there would have been a retaliation.' I have no doubts about that." (It's not clear whether Reston attended the demonstration, but it's worth noting that none of the Times reporters who filed stories the day after the protest mentioned any spitting.)
Another protester was George Dennison, a World War II veteran, peace activist, and teacher, whose influential manifesto for educational reform, The Lives of Children (Random House, 1969), would be published soon afterward. His account of the events, which appeared in the November 1967 issue of Liberation, also offers a counterpoint to Reston and others. Dennison reported a confrontation that was "almost classically nonviolent." The protesters viewed the soldiers standing before them not as enemies but as potential allies. They repeatedly appealed to the troops to lay down their arms and join them or, if not that, to take a break: "Let the troops relax! Give the troops a smoke!" were among the chants to be heard. (Patterson remembered those chants: "Some of the demonstrators were asking us to lay down our arms and join the demonstration. I had a good laugh at this as I explained that I only had ten days left in the Army.")
The New York Times carries a lot more weight in historical memory than a small-circulation, pacifist magazine. In most historical accounts of the Pentagon demonstration, Reston trumps Dennison — and no one seems to have asked the MPs what they remembered. Lost in the fog of war surrounding the events of the Pentagon protest is any acknowledgment of the nonviolent values and behavior of most of those who gathered there.
Not only nonviolent but patriotic, for as Dennison recorded, late in the evening, when the reporters had gone home to file their disparaging stories, the demonstrators began to sing to keep up their spirits. "'America the Beautiful' fell flat, as it always does," he recalled. "We gave up singing — or at least we did until suddenly 'The Star-Spangled Banner' swelled from our throats. I had never sung it before without some twinge of resentment at the hoked-up circumstances. Here we sang it wide-open, high notes and all. It was our song."
It was a rare demonstration thereafter that heard the national anthem sung. And there were all too many antiwar protests in years to come that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be said to owe anything to the pacifist movement for inspiration. Among those swept up in the violent protests of the later 1960s was a Stanford University student named Craig McNamara, son of the secretary of defense. "I remember the rage setting in on me, and the frustration that we all felt because we couldn't stop the war," he told Tom Wells, author of The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam (University of California Press, 1994).
I, too, remember that rage, and the air of violence it bred, and was caught up in it myself. But that was not the spirit of the siege of the Pentagon in October 1967. If only Robert McNamara had recognized its true Gandhi-like character. If only he had responded to the protesters' chants of "Join us!" and come down from his office and out into our ranks, and, symbolically, laid down his own arms. Maybe he would have had a better day. And maybe we would have been spared the extremes to come.
Maurice Isserman is a professor of American history at Hamilton College. He is co-author, with Michael Kazin, of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 2007).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 8, Page B14
Carolyn L. Karcher
Reminiscences of the 1967
March on the Pentagon
From reading John McAuliff's
newsletter comments on the March on the Pentagon, I realize that I have completely
forgotten the demonstration on the Mall that preceded it. I heard many of the same speakers at
countless other demonstrations, but I simply can't call them to mind for this
one.
In October 1967, I was still
very new to anti-war demonstrations--in fact to demonstrations of any
kind. I had attended a demonstration
against the Vietnam War in June 1966, just before leaving with my husband for a
year in India. The October 1967 march
was probably my second one.
I went with two friends from
Stanford University, and I vaguely remember marching with them across the
bridge to the Pentagon. I never intended
to commit civil disobedience, only to protest publicly against the war. So when the organizers announced that all
those who did not intend to commit civil disobedience should leave, I would
have done so, except that my friends
wanted to stay, and I did not
dare walk home alone at night through the streets of Washington; hence, I
stayed with them.
At a certain point, probably
after the departure of all media representatives, troops emerged with gas masks
(or at any rate visors) and fixed bayonets and began trying to disperse or
divide the demonstrators, who were sitting peacefully on the ground, according
to instructions from our leaders. The
troops proceeded systematically and brutally, kicking the seated demonstrators
with their heavy boots and knocking our comrades over the head with their rifle
butts, which they wielded right and left. I was sitting far away, at the other
end of the crowd, so I didn't get hurt, but I was absolutely petrified all
night.
Another thing I remember is that
despite strict instructions from our leaders to remain nonviolent, and despite
vehement protests from the seated demonstrators, a few people at the back
started hurling projectiles toward the troops, over the heads of the
demonstrators. I had never heard of agents provocateurs at the time, but I now
surmise that that's who these people were.
What got me through the night
was the conviction that the next day, the press would reveal the truth about
how a nonviolent protest was met by troops who treated US citizens as if they
were the enemy. Instead, when my friends
and I got home and opened up the Washington Post, the headlines that greeted us
were: TROOPS SHOW GREAT RESTRAINT AGAINST VIOLENT DEMONSTRATORS. That marked the start of my political (re)education.
 |
| Jane Rose Kasmir, age 17 (photo by Marc Riboud) |
Bill Ramsey
Launched for a Lifetime
Norman Mailer dubbed us “armies of the night.” But I
retreated before sunset to what I thought would be safer ground. As our protesting
“armies” pitched tents on the Pentagon’s lawn for the night, I was thumbing a ride
back to North Carolina.
October 21, 1967 was a long stretch of a day. Three
days earlier I had approached a table in the corner of the cafeteria at my
school, High Point College. Jim stood
behind the table, offering draft counseling literature and urging those who stopped
at the table to go with him to the March on the Pentagon. I had first met him when
I volunteered as a tutor with VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) – the
domestic peace corps of the 1960s. I had
watched him work in a low-income neighborhood, attempting to bring African
Americans, Native Americans and whites into common community development
projects. I trusted him and decided to go to Washington with him. It would be
my first public demonstration.
Jim picked me up from my dorm at midnight on Friday
night in a 1953 black coupe. The front passenger seat was already occupied by
Kate, also a VISTA volunteer. I took the back seat and settled in for the long
ride. We wound along the smaller roads connecting piedmont North Carolina with
the nation’s capital; Jim said that the car’s engine could not handle highway
speeds. He and Kate alternated driving and sleeping, so the trip was short on
conversation.
A pole was
wedged out the back passenger window, displaying a black flag with a white
omega – the Greek letter that was the symbol of the emerging draft resistance
movement. With the back window partially open, I became chilled and buttoned the
wool topcoat that my father had bought me in a Lower Manhattan garment shop. It
was a “going off to college” gift – Dad’s idea of what the well-dressed freshman
would wear to winter classes. I had seen newspaper pictures of young men in
coats and ties in New York City turning in and burning their draft cards at
Sheeps Meadow in Central Park just a few days before, on October 15th.
I assumed that since I was going to a similar event in the nation’s capital,
the topcoat would be the proper attire.
It was mid-morning when we crossed the 14th
Street Bridge. The streets of Washington, DC, were filled with armored personnel
carriers, and rifle-toting soldiers were stationed at nearly every corner along
the National Mall. It was my first-ever visit to Washington. In November of
1963, as John Kennedy’s body was being carried through the streets on a horse-drawn
caisson, my family drove around the city on our way from New Jersey to
Thanksgiving in Georgia with our extended family. That was as close as I had
come to visiting the capital.
I asked Jim if the presence of troops was usual. He
said, “I’ve never seen it like this.” I wondered, what exaggerated sense of threat
had prompted orders for this show of force? We parked the coupe and joined
others, as our restless “army” took up its own positions on both sides of the Reflecting
Pool leading up to the Lincoln Memorial.
A week later the High Point College campus newspaper would
carry a column by its editor, who had also traveled to the DC area the weekend
of the march. He said he had a “front row seat” watching the march on television
in his parents’ living room on Andrews Air Force Base. Out the living room
window early Saturday morning, he watched as squadrons of helicopters shuttled
troops into DC. He opined that the march was a futile protest, since he was
certain that no one worked in the Pentagon on weekends.
As we gathered among others unfurling omega flags, Jim
warned me that he would be marching with those who had recently turned in their
draft cards – the tie-and-coat gang from October 15th, who I could
see had definitely dressed down for the march. They were among the initial waves
of thousands who would burn or turn in their draft cards in the months following
the March on the Pentagon.
I was welcome
to join them, Jim told me, but he predicted that the “omega contingent” would
likely be infiltrated by FBI informants. If I did not want an FBI file opened
on me, I should march with others, he said. A decade later, I would discover through a
Freedom of Information Act request that my FBI file opened with quotes from my letter
to the draft board explaining why I subsequently had turned in my own draft
card.
But on that day, I was not prepared to join the “omega
contingent.” After a walk along the Reflecting Pool in search of others to
march with, I found a “non-aligned college student contingent” near the stage
erected on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where I was about to see and hear
Peter Paul and Mary and Phil Ochs live for the first time. David Dellinger, the coordinator
of the National Mobilization Committee that had organized the demonstration,
opened the rally. A year later, he would be one of the Chicago Eight, charged
with crossing state lines to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The
special commission appointed to investigate that event later issued the Walker Report,
which concluded that police had committed unrestrained and indiscriminate acts of
violence against protesters, characterizing it as a “police riot.”
Pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, author Norman Mailer, comedian Dick
Gregory, and singer Peter Yarrow followed David with rousing speeches. When a
member of the British Labour Party took the stage to announce his opposition to
the war, members of the American Nazi Party rushed the stage and turned over
the podium. I do not remember, nor have I found any reference to, women among
the rally speakers. As I reflect back on
those who spoke from the stage that day, it seems providential that I would have occasions to work alongside three of
them in the decades that followed.
Twenty years
after that march, David Dellinger would sit on my couch in St. Louis, with one
of my daughters on each side, as he told them stories of his life as a “hobo”
in the 1930s after graduating from Yale Divinity School. He stayed in our home
on three occasions while on speaking tours, helping us mobilize a new generation
of students against the Gulf War – still “hoboing” around the country decades
later. My now-grown daughters still remember him as “Dad’s hobo friend.”
Dick Gregory, a native of St. Louis, would return periodically to
help us with disarmament campaigns in the early 1980s and human rights
struggles in the ’90s. In 2005 Peter
Yarrow, at our encouragement, broke away from preparations for a St. Louis concert
to lend his voice and experience to support a 19-day student sit-in at
Washington University over the administration’s refusal to recognize the labor
rights of campus service workers. As a member of Jobs with Justice, I served on
the students’ community support committee. It was a particularly tense, yet
centered, evening – the students hanging out the windows of the office they
occupied as Peter sang in the fading light, while police surrounded the
building, poised to remove the protesters.
Back in DC in 1967, when my
contingent headed out toward the bridge over the Potomac River, we were directly
behind those who had spoken from the stage. I marched feeling inspired but
anonymous. Alone in my dressy topcoat, I was concerned that I might be mistaken
by other marchers for an FBI informant. I later learned that federal agents usually
dressed down for their undercover excursions to demonstrations in an effort to
blend in – although there was an instance in 1972 of an informant dressing up
in clerical garb and collar to infiltrate the National Union of Theological
Students and Seminarians (NUTS) as we
organized civil disobedience actions against the war.
I seemed to have lost my “college contingent.”
On my left was a priest (or perhaps an informant dressed like a priest?), and
on my right a man with his seven-year-old son. We introduced ourselves as we
crossed the bridge. Our line of march was as wide as the bridge, and I could
see those up ahead, but not the end of the line behind us. Once across the
bridge we turned east on a service road and the line narrowed.
We entered a parking lot as
the first contingent of notables, all dressed in coats and ties, attempted to lead
us in an encirclement of the Pentagon. Blocked by a line of soldiers, they knelt
and were promptly arrested. My contingent now became the front line of the
march. Someone suggested that we proceed
up an embankment to the steps and try to enter the Pentagon.
We climbed the side steps and found the center landing
occupied by a line of soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder with rifles and
bayonets ready. The priest and the man and his son were no longer at my side. Only
a few feet separated the new front line of the march from the tips of the bayonets,
as thousands of marchers pressed forward, filling the steps behind us. I felt
trapped as the stand-off ramped up.
A young woman plucked a flower from her hair and stepped
forward, placing it in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle. I heard the click of a
camera’s shutter. The young soldier looked confused, his eyes riveted on the
flower. His face seemed to mirror the same fear that I felt. I wondered, did he
also feel trapped?
The march leaders who were not already arrested arrived
on the landing. One suggested that we attempt to crawl between the soldiers’
feet. Several marchers dropped down on their knees. As they maneuvered under and
between the soldiers, I feared their outstretched arms would be grazed by
bayonets. A few marchers rushed to their aid, while others suggested that we
sit down in front of the soldiers. Someone said, “No, we did that in Berkeley, and
they came down on our heads.”
Several demonstrators, apparently expecting what was
to come and having arrived prepared, put on football helmets. They clambered up
the elevated stone wall along the steps. Once beyond the soldiers’ line, they
sat down on the upper landing and began to address the crowd. MPs appeared from
inside the Pentagon with batons raised. They beat our helmeted companions and
carried them away.
With the stand-off uncertain but feeling clearly
unsafe, I “jumped ship.” Actually, I jumped a wall by the landing’s side stairs
and headed up the embankment to the southbound highway. Relieved to be out of
the fray, I stuck out my thumb. A red sports car stopped, and the young driver
asked me where I was headed. When I said “High Point, North Carolina,” he responded,
“I’m headed back to Camp Lejeune – get in.”
Knowing Camp Lejeune to be a Marine base near the
North Carolina coast, I warily lowered myself into the passenger seat. He
asked, “Where have you been?” With not much more than a murmur, I answered, “The
Pentagon.” And he said, “Thanks. I was there, too.” He told me that he was
expecting orders to be deployed to Vietnam any day and that this was his first,
and maybe last, chance to speak out.
There we were, side by side in a sports car headed
south, an anti-war student attending college with the aid of a student
deferment from the draft board and a Marine about to be sent to fight a war
that he believed was wrong. We were two
novices, returning from our first demonstration. This was my initial hint that those
refusing to fight and those forced to fight the Vietnam War would join forces
to eventually end it.
This notion of the convergence of civilian and
military resistance to the war was counter to the popular myth of animosity, but
the convergence surfaced more clearly as the years passed. As my activism grew
and the movement struggled to end the air wars over Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos,
a young former Army private from rural Ohio, who had refused three times to
board a plane to Vietnam and then became a Quaker, coached us in the tactics of
nonviolent campaigns. At a 1972 National Council of Churches meeting on the war
in Kansas City, Missouri, I was among a group of anti-war seminarians who took
over the stage and immediately turned the podium over to members of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War, so that they could address the gathering whose
leadership had denied them a place on the program.
One January morning in 1973 in New Bern, North Carolina,
I watched from the gallery of a federal courtroom as a retired career Marine
officer testified on behalf of his son, who was on trial for draft resistance.
It was hard to tell for sure from across the room, but it appeared that even a
juror or two were in tears. However, the following day the jury found the
resister guilty and the judge sentenced him to prison, as nine of us fellow draft
resisters stood with him for sentencing, risking contempt of court.
I was honored to counsel two St. Louis Marine Reservists
from north St. Louis who refused orders to Iraq in 1991. After lending their voices to our efforts to
prevent the Gulf War, they spent the duration of the war and months beyond in the
Marine brig at Camp Lejeune. A decade later, a Korean War veteran who was the
executive director of Veterans for Peace and I watched on a television in the
basement of the World Community Center in St. Louis, in disbelief and fear for
what was to come, as the second tower of the World Trade Center fell.
The Marine in the sports car dropped me off in
Virginia at the point where one highway headed southeast to Camp Lejeune and
the other southwest to High Point. I stuck out my thumb again. A Virginia State
Patrol cruiser rose over the hill. The trooper turned on his flashing lights, pulled
over and told me to get in. Noticing for the first time that I had failed to
remove the peace buttons from my wool coat, I then endured a long lecture about
my lack of patriotism. “You got to love this country or leave it. You wouldn’t
have the freedom to demonstrate if I had not fought for it. It’s disloyal to protest
while our troops are in a war.”
Suddenly, the cruiser
stopped and I looked up to see only corn fields. “Get out!” the trooper
ordered. “Where am I?” I asked. “Get out!” he repeated more forcefully. Again I
asked, “Where am I?” He refused to answer. I stepped out and, with all the
indignation I could muster, I slammed the door. Not a good decision.
The officer got out with baton in hand and strode
around to the passenger door. He opened it, then grabbed me by the collar of my
wool coat and backed me up on the cruiser’s hood with his baton raised. “Go
back and close the door softly!” he yelled. I did, and he pulled away.
After a very long walk, I found my way into downtown Petersburg,
Virginia, where I secured a room in a less than reputable hotel for $2.50. As I checked in, a group of men and women were
huddled around the television in the lobby, watching the news reports from the
Pentagon. At that moment, the protesters’ tents pitched on the Pentagon lawn seemed
like they might have been the safer option for the night.
I caught a ride
early the next morning with a salesman on his way to the High Point furniture
market. Back on campus, as I made my way down the hall to my room, my
fraternity brothers greeted me with reprimands. They were particularly angered a
week later when an interview with me about the march appeared in the campus newspaper.
I was, in their words, “an embarrassment to the brotherhood.” They urged that I
be expelled. Not long after that, I obliged their concern and left fraternity
life behind.
One might think
after all this that I would have decided that my first demonstration was my
last. I did hang up my wool topcoat, but not my determination to end the war. In
many ways, the sun has never set on that long stretch of a day, and I have remained
on that crowded Pentagon landing – launched for a lifetime.
Cathy Wilkerson
Because of its long standing
commitment to local organizing, SDS had debated whether to support the National
Mobilization’s march in Washington in 1967.
In the end, SDS did support it but did not pledge any resources to work
on it. National demonstrations, I
thought, didn’t build organizations in which people could learn new ideas,
change their thinking participate in new kinds of democratic forums.
The Mobe had wrested a permit to
gather at the Lincoln Memorial and march to the parking lot at the Pentagon
where there would be a rally. Then, some
would engage in civil disobedience. Some
of the Mobe leaders challenged Dellinger’s plan to do civil disobedience at the
Pentagon. They felt that it would set up
a situation that was too dangerous with the large crowd expected. Dellinger, however, argued persuasively for
the importance of including space for those who believed fervently in the power
of nonviolent direct action.
Meanwhile, word spread about the
mobile street tactics and the exhilaration they had produced in Oakland during
the Stop the Draft Week when demonstrators had shut down their local induction
center. Many young people - including a
great many SDS people in town already for the demonstration - began urging
their friends to do the same in Washington.
Greg Calvert, the previous National Secretary of SDS, had been working
in New York since leaving the National Office, most recently as an informal SDS
coordinator with the Mobilization for the demonstration. He had become more and more committed to the
philosophy of nonviolent direct action after long conversations with Dellinger
and Barbara Deming, another life-long leader of non-violent confrontations. He had decided to participate in the civil
disobedience with Dellinger, Deming and others, even though he knew this would
run counter to the sentiments of most of his SDS friends.
Greg, Dellinger, and other Mobe
organizers listened uneasily to the growing enthusiasm for street
confrontations and hurriedly called a meeting for the evening before the march
for all SDS people in town and any other young people who wanted to come. Greg
and Arthur Kinoy, a lawyer for the Mobe and an articulate and sometimes fiery
orator with experience dating back to civil liberties struggles from the 40's
and 50's, came to our SDS house on Lanier Place. More than a
hundred and fifty people stuffed themselves into our downstairs. Greg
argued passionately that we were facing one of the most violent institutions in
the history of mankind and we could not hope to defeat it by using
violence. Like Gandhi, we had to
mobilize the best moral instincts of people to our side and we couldn’t do that
through violence.
The debate was fierce. Many in SDS argued that peaceful
demonstrations had accomplished nothing but bashed heads and that those in
power were just laughing at us. As
always, I was drawn to what I saw as the moral purity of the pacifist position,
that one’s life was one’s argument, and one’s willingness to sacrifice was the
most powerful moral testimony. The
Buddhist monks in Vietnam
who had immolated themselves had moved me deeply. Nonetheless, I was also
beginning to think that the government was showing they could tolerate this
kind of dissent without changing policy, that they had contempt for us because
they believed we didn’t have the power to oppose them. Besides, I couldn’t see how civil
disobedience could allow me to express my anger, and if I didn’t find a way to
let it out, I felt like I would explode.
Finally, the SDS people present, including the influential members from
New York like Jeff Jones, grudgingly agreed to spread the word that people were
supposed to follow the Mobe marshals and not break off into the streets of D.C.
The next morning, the sun rose into a brilliant blue sky. Thousands of people gathered at the Lincoln
Memorial and began the long walk to the Memorial
Bridge over the Potomac
where we were to proceed to the rally at the side parking lot of the Pentagon.
I was walking with friends from Washington SDS but also looking for other
friends from New York and Chicago. In between the conversations we chanted “Hey
Hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” or “Hell No, We Won’t go!” and the
new slogan “Hell no, nobody goes!”
As we came to the end of the bridge,
there was a commotion up ahead. I moved
to the side of the street to try to see what was going on and saw a small band
of marchers, led by someone carrying an NLF (National Liberation Front of South
Vietnam) flag, break away from the main crowd and start running up a grassy
hill to the left. There were no
buildings on that side of the road, only well kept lawns rolling over several
small hills. I realized then that we had
actually reached the Pentagon area and the breakaway band was heading more
directly to the massive stone building than the main march which was following
the road. Someone yelled “Storm the
Pentagon.” Most of the SDS people near-by, including my group, started to
follow. We ran at top speed toward the Pentagon, at one point clambering over
an orange snow fence which had been trampled down by the leaders of the surge.
I was mainly concentrating on the
ground and not falling when I discovered we had reached a flight of stairs leading to an entrance of the
Pentagon. As we headed up, I saw a door
about twenty-five feet up on a large terrace.
Two opposite facing sets of stone stairs led up to an intermediate
platform, from which a wide set of stairs led up to the terrace. I was near the top of the second set of
stairs when the people in front of me stopped abruptly, as the front line of
our break-off group had come face to face with a line of helmeted MP’s with
drawn rifles with fixed bayonets. They had not been expecting to see any action
and were clearly nervous about whether they were actually supposed to use those
bayonets should people try to push past.
Behind me, hundreds of people still
rushing up the stairs did not know what had stopped the lines and they pushed
forward trying to reach the top, thinking only that there was a problem with
congestion. This pressure pushed the front line right up against the
bayonets. After a few moments, someone
apparently gave an order for the MPs to move forward to clear the way for
reinforcements from behind. I had heard
about the police formations called wedges they used to try to break through
lines of demonstrators and thought they might try to drive us down the stairs.
By then, I had wriggled my way up to
the landing, although I was still several rows back from the front lines. If the guard had tried to push us back they
would indeed have had to use their bayonets because we couldn’t go. By then hundreds and hundreds of people had
amassed on the stairs and the ground below.
For this moment, the intensity of the stand-off felt symbolic of the
political stand-off in the nation. How
could the generals not see that the people in the U.S. were ready to come to blows
over this issue, that the unity claimed by the politicians wasn’t real, that we
were more than a few fringe lunatics.
I had no idea what we should do
next. For at least five minutes it felt like a bloody conflagration could
happen any second. Some demonstrators at the front were taunting the soldiers,
looking to increase the level of confrontation.
Greg Calvert, who had followed his friend Tom Bell into the charge up
the hill despite his resolve to participate with the main body of the march, tells
the story in his book of seeing Tom, pumped with adrenalin, grab one of the
bullhorns, scramble to the top of the wall surrounding the terrace and urge the
crowd to press forward. Greg reached him
and yelled, “This is not a fucking foot ball game!” at which point Tom hastily
reconsidered his provocative invectives.
Most of us were so astonished to be there that we didn’t yet have time
to think through what to do next. At
that point Greg and Jeff Shero, both of whom had been passed bull horns, argued
that everyone should sit down, as a way of holding our ground but de-escalating
the confrontation. Slowly, over the next
few minutes, individuals and small groups of people began to lower themselves
in the tightly packed sea of people, until at a certain point everyone who
could was sitting. Most of the taunting
stopped, but the tension - charged with the awareness of what could still
happen - crackled in the air.
Demonstrators assumed positions on
the walls surrounding the flagstone porch in front of the door. A few people started making short speeches to
encourage the crowd and denounce MacNamara and the Pentagon for the actions in Vietnam . Here we were, unfriendly forces camped at
their front door. It seemed unlikely
they would let us stay.
Little by little, people started
trying to lighten up the situation.
Someone had flowers and started putting the flowers in the barrels of
the soldiers’ rifles. Other people set
up first aid stations lower down and organized a supply network, sending people
for water, food, cigarettes and later blankets.
Initial taunting of the young soldiers was replaced by chants of “Join
Us, Join Us.” Several people started to
talk to the soldiers about the war and what would happen to them if they were
sent over. Did they really want to fight
and die so US corporations could secure markets for their products, many of
which would be destructive to the Vietnamese people and their culture? They were under orders, of course, not to
answer back, and most, but not all, continued to stare straight ahead and just
listen. Small conversations broke out
among the demonstrators about what to do next.
The main part of the demonstration had continued around to the front of
the Pentagon and were listening to speeches.
In the first half-hour, another
group of arriving demonstrators saw that the near end of the adjoining terrace
was unguarded, and using a rope, they scaled the wall until several hundred
people held the space, with a few even entering the Pentagon through a side
door. Reinforcements arrived immediately and they were quickly, and not gently,
arrested. Twenty minutes later, a skirmish broke out between M.P.’s and
demonstrators on the edge of our terrace and several people were dragged off
and presumably arrested. The debate
among the demonstrators about what to do intensified. Some people thought it was wrong to stay and
face inevitable arrest, which would most likely be quite brutal; others felt
they were exercising their right to petition the government, in the form of the
Pentagon, and were doing no wrong.
Others wanted to display their anger at US policy as forcibly as possible,
hoping to make policy-makers pay attention.
At one point, the bull horn was
passed to me by one of the male SDS leaders. I was aware that I would be one of
the only women to speak. The previous speaker had spoken up against the war and
tried to inspire people to stay and face whatever came. I wanted to rise to the occasion and give an
inspiring speech, advising people of the best way to move at that point. With bull horn in hand, however, I realized I
didn’t know what to say. While the
moments seemed filled with drama and opportunity, I didn’t know what we should
do. I, like most people, had moved on instinct. I saw the potential for many people to get
hurt, and while I wanted to stay, to express my anger, I wasn’t comfortable
urging others to stay and risk injury.
Unable to get past my own conflicted
feelings, I said that we were staying to
show the depth of our opposition to the war, but that everyone didn’t need to
stay if they wanted to express their opposition in other ways. Staying was not a measure of someone’s commitment
to stop the killing of Vietnamese. My
early experiences in and observations of the civil rights movement guided
me: If you encouraged someone to take a
risk, then it was your responsibility to try to back up that person as much as
possible.
As the evening
progressed, the October air got very chilly.
Some people started bonfires to stay warm, burning whatever wood had
fallen to the ground from the many trees, parts of the snow fence and many
posters and banners people had carried on the march. Some people talked about staying all
night. Others started to drift away. The
tension in our section eased somewhat, with a few of the soldiers beginning to
respond and have conversations about the war and their futures. Young people returned with cookies and soda
which they passed around to everyone.
As it got dark, I began to think
about leaving. Around 9:30 the crowd was
sprayed with tear gas as the Military Police were replaced by paratroopers,
some veterans of Vietnam . It turned out that their mission was to form
a wedge through the main body of demonstrators - still several hundred - who
remained on the terrace. By 10:00 p.m.
they had begun the operation, but rather than being a clean military operation,
it was characterized by prolonged beating of those demonstrators sitting in
front. Soldiers purposefully kicked
women in the breast. One woman reported
that she had been knocked over, one soldier stepped on her long hair while
another proceeded to drag her in the opposite direction. (Washington Free Press)
At some point the rumor went along
the line that MacNamara had arrived at the Pentagon. Around the same time, the soldiers’ assault
stopped, although by then many dozens had been arrested and the crowd had been
pushed back to the top of the stairs. In
the quiet period after the last skirmish, however, it became hard to articulate
the goal of staying. Clearly, it was a
war of attrition and eventually everyone would be arrested. Most of us decided to leave. A small group of a couple of hundred people
decided to stay, seeing their presence as an act of civil disobedience.
An edited
excerpt from Flying Close to the Sun,
by Cathy Wilkerson
Bruce Beyer
Stop The Draft Week
October 16-21, 1967
In late May of 1967 having miserably failed out of college, I took a job as a night clerk in a motel on Main St. in downtown Buffalo, NY which bordered on the outer reaches of the Black community. It wasn't much of a job but it kept my parents off my back while I struggled to make decisions about my future. That summer, rebellion broke out in Buffalo and the motel became a overnight destination for reporters covering the events as well as a gathering spot for cops making forays into the "combat zones". For three nights I watched in total amazement the frenzied activity of the occupying forces and then it was over.As the days passed I came to realize that I had witnessed a war, a war on rebellious people demanding justice, jobs, and an end to police repression. I came to realize what I had experienced was exactly what the people of South East Asia were experiencing on a never ending, if not far more deadly daily occurrence.
Up until that time, I had not given a lot of thought to the Vietnam war. I knew I was about to lose my student draft deferment and that Selective Service was going to be seeking my active participation but I had no idea what to do about it. I had some vague idea about enlisting in a branch of the military which would allow me to avoid combat but beyond that, I really hadn't given it much thought. I was a 19 year old white middle class kid who had never even dreamed about combat let alone killing someone else.
The summer went on, my draft board caught up with me, I was reclassified 1-A and ordered to report for a physical. I went down to an Air Force recruiting center and spoke with a recruiter about enlisting. After some perfunctory tests he assured me I would be assigned to a missile base in the US and I signed a pre-enlistment agreement with a three month deferral clause.
Toward the end of August I went to a conference sponsored by the Unitarian Church at a place called Star Island off the coast of New Hampshire. It was there that I came in contact for the first time with anti-war activists. Organizers with the Vietnam Sumner Campaign were in attendance and there was endless talk about the war, the draft, and our responses to it. I met a woman named Marcia Sommers who asked what I was going to do and when I told her about my plans she looked me dead in the eye and asked if I had ever considered simply refusing to participate?
I'd never heard of such a thing. I'd never imagined such a concept but it instantly made sense and by the time I left Star Island I knew I was going to turn my draft card in and refuse induction. I went back to Buffalo and told my parents of my intentions. Their response was simple and straightforward, "We may not agree with your stand but we raised you to think for yourself. Good luck."
September and early October 1967 seemed to drag slowly onward. I had no idea there was an anti-war movement in Buffalo and I felt completely isolated from former high school friends and associates. There was no one around to talk with about my plans, so there were a lot of
phone calls back and forth with my friend Marcia. She invited me to travel to Washington with her and some friends. I flew standby to Boston and we all drove down to DC together. We arrived tired and hungry late Thursday evening and spent the night in sleeping bags on the floor of a friends apartment.
Early Friday afternoon on October 20th draft resisters from across the country gathered in a church about a mile or so from the Department of Justice. After listening to speakers we made our way to the steps of the Justice Department, I remember feelings of fear and pride, anger and resentment, and an overwhelming sense that my life was about to change. I had no idea how completely altered it would be as I made my way up the steps, stood in front of a microphone, stated my name and hometown, and dropped my draft card into a briefcase held by Dr. Spock. I watched in fear as Dr. Spock and Michael Ferber carried our cards through the doors and went off to present the cards to Attorney General Ramsey Clark. I honestly thought we'd be arrested at any moment but nothing happened.
We stayed up late talking about the days events and the following morning we headed out to the Lincoln Memorial to take part in the demonstration heading to the Pentagon. I remember being astonished by the sheer number of people and the volume of the chants. I remember locking arms and marching twenty or thirty across, taking up the entire street in waves of chanting protesters. I felt a part of something outside of myself, a part that was reaching out to those fighting in Vietnam and demanding that they be brought home NOW.
We'd heard that Tuli Kuferberg and The Fugs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jerry Rubin were going to attempt to levitate the Pentagon. Marching with all those people almost made me imagine it might be possible. The streets were filled with characters. I walked for awhile with General Hershey Bar and General Wastemoreland. I was astonished at the audacity of Walter Teague proudly carrying the NLF flag. Little did I know that less than a year later I would be carrying that same flag in a demonstration during an anti-ROTC demonstration in Buffalo.
Then the soldiers came into view, bayonets fixed, surrounding the Pentagon, looking fierce and apprehensive. I remember coming up face to face with rows of soldiers not much older than I. It dawned on me that many were as afraid of me as I was of them. I watched with glee as demonstrators gently shoved flowers down gun barrels and urged the soldiers to come over to our side. Rumors swept through the crowd, "a soldiers just crossed the line on the other side of the building, the feds are making arrests, the buildings moving." As the afternoon gave way to nightfall I became separated from my friends and decided to spend the night on the terrace.
I don't remember much about that night beyond the fact that it got cold and that we huddled together for warmth. We were surrounded by soldiers but I don't remember feeling afraid until the Federal Marshals showed up and started yelling commands through their bullhorns. I caught whiffs of what I was told was tear gas and saw helmeted civilians reaching through the ranks of soldiers, grabbing individuals, pulling them back and beating them with nightsticks. Shortly thereafter we were ordered to move or be arrested. I wasn't moving so I was roughly arrested, lined up, and bused off to the Occoquan Work House. Upon arrival my first thoughts were amazement at how well maintained the handsome brick buildings presented themselves. It looked like a college campus.
We were assigned beds in huge dormitories. I happened to end up in the same one as Mailer, Kupferberg, and Sgt. Donald Duncan. My only memories of Mailer were his incessant loud demands for bail as he had a dinner date that evening. The rest of us sat quietly, talked in low voices, and slept. Mr. Mailer was released fairly early and the rest of us were processed out by the next afternoon.
PS:
On August 19, 1968 my friend Bruce Cline and I were arrested after taking symbolic sanctuary in the Buffalo Unitarian Church for having refused induction. 32 FBI agents, federal marshals, and border patrol agents backed up by 100 Buffalo cops came to arrest two draft resisters and in the process arrested seven others. We were charged with assaulting, intimidating, and impeding the cops. We called ourselves the Buffalo Nine. Of the Nine four were Vietnam vets, and the rest were SDS, YAWF, Peace and Freedom, and Buffalo Draft Resistance organizers. There were two trials. I alone was convicted of assault, in the second, two of the vets were convicted. We all received three years sentences.
Shortly thereafter I was indicted for inciting a riot, burglary, arson, and conspiracy to commit arson after Univ. of Buffalo students ransacked a ROTC training facility following an anti-draft speech I made.
I left the United States in March of 1970 and jumped a $5,000. bail bond. I went underground to Canada, obtained a false passport and made my way to Sweden where I was granted humanitarian asylum. In April of 1972, after marrying a Canadian woman, I immigrated to Canada where I lived the next four plus years.
On October 20, 1977 after reading Gloria Emerson's book "Winners and Losers", I returned to the US with my attorney, the former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the same man I had returned my draft card to in 1967. Walking alongside us was Col. Ed Miller the highest ranking Marine Corps POW who served five years in Hanoi camps and fifty or so Vietnam vets. Gloria Emerson, Cora Weiss, Gold Star mother Patricia Simon, my father and scores of other supporters also walked across with me.
The Pentagon march from the left perspective of a French film maker. It is available for on line rental from Amazon Video or can be purchased as a DVD.
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon
by Icarus Films
Director: Chris Marker
DVD ~ Release Date: 2008-09-02
List Price: $14.99
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