March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam -
November 1969
Excerpt from Crossing Boundaries in the Americas, Vietnam and the Middle East by Ron Young
(page 91 - 98)
In June 1969 I was chosen to
be the Coordinator of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in
Vietnam (known as the “Mobilization” or the “Mobe”), a broad coalition of
organizations planning marches for peace in Vietnam in Washington, DC and San
Francisco on November 15. Despite Al Hassler’s reservations about the inclusive
nature of the coalition and its call for “Withdrawal Now,” FOR agreed to
release me with pay to take on this responsibility. During the summer and early
fall, Rev. Dick Fernandez of Clergy and Laymen Concerned, Stewart Meacham of
the Quaker American Friends Service Committee, and I organized small diverse
teams of national anti-war activists and leaders, including representatives of
clergy, secular political groups, women’s peace organizations, and students, to
travel to more than forty cities nationwide to generate participation in a
variety of protest activities that fall, including the November 15 mass marches
and rallies. I participated in a travel team that visited ten cities in five
days, meeting with coalitions of local anti-war activists in two cities each
day.
As plans for the mass march
on Washington developed, I also began meeting every couple of weeks in
Philadelphia with representatives of several religious groups, including AFSC,
Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam, and A Quaker Action Group to discuss
the idea of adding a morally compelling, symbolic action component to the
protest plans. By this time, there already had been many local demonstrations
in which people gathered publicly, often outside of draft boards or military
recruiting stations, to read the names of Americans who had been killed in
Vietnam. The discussions in Philadelphia came up with an idea for what we
decided to call the “March Against Death.” We developed an ambitious plan to
recruit Americans from each state equal to the number of U.S. soldiers from
that state who already had been killed in Vietnam. The state delegations would
gather at Arlington Cemetery in alphabetical order by state and walk slowly in
single file from there to the Capitol, each person carrying a placard with the
name of a soldier from their state who had been killed. As they passed by the
White House, each marcher would turn and call out the name he or she was carrying. When they reached the
Capitol, participants would place their placards in a large wooden coffin on
the Capitol steps.
As preparations continued, we
realized that we didn’t have – nor would we ever have – the names of hundreds
of thousands of Vietnamese who had been killed, so we decided to add placards
with the names of Vietnamese villages that had been destroyed. This idea was
inspired by a news story in February 1968 filed by James Arnett of the
Associated Press who quoted an anonymous U.S. Army Major commenting on the
destruction of Ben Tre, a South Vietnamese provincial capital. The Major had
told Arnett that in order to prevent Ben Tre from falling to the Communists, “It
had become necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.”
While I focused most of my
energy on mobilizing support for the mass march and rally, my wife Trudi worked
as Co-coordinator with Dick Fernandez organizing the March Against Death. We
estimated that with participants walking slowly from Arlington Cemetery to the
Capitol in single file, six feet apart, carrying the names of more than 38,000
American servicemen, interspersed with names of destroyed Vietnamese villages,
the March Against Death would continue for approximately 36 hours. Since the
mass march and rally on Saturday, November 15 was scheduled to begin at 11:00
a.m., counting time backwards, the Alabama state delegation would have to step
off from Arlington Cemetery at approximately 11:00 pm on Thursday night,
November 13. The March Against Death worked as planned, with state delegations
arriving at Arlington near the times they were scheduled to step-off.
Participants were provided housing and food at a dozen downtown churches that
served as Movement Centers.
Inspired by the theme of the
march, Pablo Picasso donated a black and white image for a special
commemorative poster. Reminiscent of Guernica, the poster showed a smiling tank
chewing up human figures. I believe many people who participated in the March
Against Death would never forget the names of the persons on the placards they
carried during the long walk from Arlington Cemetery to the U.S. Capitol.
The March Against Death
represented a high standard of protest that uniquely and movingly honored
Americans who gave their lives in Vietnam and, at the same time, made a very
strong statement against the war. The March combined a clear moral message with
the capacity to communicate to diverse publics. While it wasn’t always the
case, I believe that high standard should have guided all public anti-war
protests.
Arranging the logistics,
including transportation, parking, communication equipment, sanitary
facilities, and security, for the two events in Washington, was complex and
challenging. The Nixon Administration, which not surprisingly opposed the
protests, put up numerous administrative, political and legal obstacles to
block or at least delay our ability to make necessary logistical arrangements.
I participated in Mobilization Committee delegations that met regularly with
Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindeist and his assistant John Dean. These
negotiating sessions frequently were followed by pressurized press conferences,
including one that I chaired with Coretta Scott King and Dr. Benjamin Spock as
speakers. Motivated by Administration-leaked rumors, the media seemed more
focused on whether the march would remain nonviolent than they were on the
catastrophic violence of the war we were protesting.
The months leading up to the
November 15 March were very intense politically, but also personally for Trudi
and me. My own self-doubts and insecurities surfaced strongly several times
during these months when Trudi and I were living in a rented apartment in
Washington, DC. There were nights when I hardly slept at all and I kept Trudi
awake as I battled bouts of anxiety from feeling overwhelmed by the pressures
of my responsibilities. Our deep respect and love for each other and our common
commitments, as well as our ability to laugh at ourselves, helped us to get
through these very intense, conflicted months.
Clearly there were legal
issues related to the government delays restricting our exercise of the
constitutionally guaranteed Right of Free Speech, issues which lawyers for the
Mobilization worked on in the courts. There were many days when negotiations
with government officials moved forward at a snail’s pace or not at all. We
learned that one of our meetings a few weeks before the march was cancelled so
that John Dean could go duck hunting in Canada. At our next meeting, Stewart
Meacham of the Quaker AFSC personally challenged Dean’s sense of priorities in
going duck hunting and appealed to his “better self” on the basis of moral
conscience to help resolve issues related to logistics for the March.
In the 1970s John Dean was
convicted and served time in prison for his role in the White House Watergate
scandal. Subsequently, he wrote several books analyzing and warning about
authoritarian rule in Washington, including Worse Than Watergate: The Secret
Presidency of George W. Bush, in which he argued that Bush should be impeached.
I would not be at all surprised if during his personal transformation, John
Dean remembered his meetings with us in Fall 1969, and especially his scolding
and personal appeal to his conscience by Stewart Meacham.
One huge logistical challenge
was that the government did not agree until a week before the march to
designate parking areas for the very large numbers of chartered buses bringing
participants to Washington. Finally, Washington D.C.’s black Mayor, Walter Washington,
was able to bring pressure on the White House and on Deputy Attorney General
Kleindiest to break the deadlock. In addition to his personal opposition to the
Vietnam War, obviously Mayor Washington had a pressing political interest to
help assure that the march came off with a minimum of disruption to the city.
Putting up roadblocks to
agreements on logistics was not the worst problem the government caused for us.
We learned later from government documents obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act that in October and early November the Nixon Administration
leaked several fake reports about threats of violence during the march. Even
worse, the government employed black F.B.I. agents posing as local D.C.
community leaders who, in secret meetings with Mobilization Committee leaders,
demanded that the Mobilization pay these “local black leaders” a dollar “head
tax” for each marcher coming into Washington. Despite physical threats, in a
very tense face-to-face meeting, Mobilization Committee leaders refused their
demand. It was only much later that we learned that the self-declared black
community leaders were actually F.B.I. agents. I was reminded of all these
government roadblocks in 2012 as reports came out about a tangle of regulatory
roadblocks and threats being prepared in Chicago, Charlotte and Tampa in
preparation for anticipated public protests at the G-8/NATO meetings and the
Democratic and Republican national party conventions.
Ironically, the political
context for organizing the November 15, 1969 March was further complicated by
competition between the Mobilization Committee and the more politically
centrist Vietnam Moratorium Committee The Moratorium was a much better-funded
protest project with close connections to the dovish wing of the Democratic
Party. Starting in October 1969, the Moratorium organizers called on people to
interrupt (declare a moratorium on) their normal activities in schools and
workplaces on the fifteenth of each month and organize public anti-war
activities on that day, including rallies, teach-ins, and vigils for peace. The
Vietnam Moratorium strategy was very creative and effective. On October 15,
1969 more than a million people nationwide and many more worldwide
participated. Bill Clinton, then a Fulbright Scholar in England, organized a
teach-in at Oxford University.
Because of their links to
cautious Democratic Party leaders, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee avoided
calling for immediate U.S. withdrawal and they excluded radical youth and old
leftists from any leadership roles. Instead, they represented a style of
anti-war politics reminiscent of the “get clean for Gene” grassroots movement
in 1968 that supported Senator Eugene McCarthy’s campaign to win the Democratic
Party’s presidential nomination. The Moratorium coordinators, Marge Sklenkar,
David Hawk, David Mixner and Sam Brown, a former National Student Association
President I took to Saigon a year later, had offices on the seventh floor at
1029 Vermont Avenue NW in Washington, DC. My office and those of the
irregularly paid and much smaller Mobilization staff were located on the ninth
floor. While many of us as staff had warm personal relations, some of the
Moratorium’s political advisors and financial backers were cool toward the
Mobilization. They were worried that the Mobilization’s march might lead to
violence and hurt the overall anti-war effort. Unfortunately, their worries,
combined with Nixon Administration allegations and the October “Days of Rage”
sponsored by the Weathermen (a radical split-off from SDS) combined to increase
public and media apprehension and attention about possible violence at the
upcoming November 15th march.
One day in late October, the
Moratorium coordinators invited me and a couple of other key Mobilization
staffers to come to their office to meet with two of their important, older “politically
savvy” backers. The two told us that they assumed that at most 250,000 people
would participate in the Mobilization march, but that even that number required
substantial logistical support. Saying they were worried about the possibility
of violence, they presented us with a list of what they claimed were the “absolute
minimal logistical resources” – such as a certain number of portable toilets,
walkie-talkies, water and first aid stations, and trained marshals for security
– to assure a peaceful march. When I called on Brad Lyttle, the Mobilization
Committee’s logistics coordinator, his report revealed, category by category,
that so far we only had verbal commitments for approximately a quarter of the
resources the Moratorium leaders said were absolutely necessary. By the day of
the march, we may have doubled these numbers, but we still came up quite a bit
short of their “absolute minimum” numbers.
As it turned out, more than
500,000 people participated in the November 15 march in Washington, making it
the largest anti-war march in U.S. history. The logistical resources, including
the number of toilets, turned out to be sufficient and the Mobilization’s
program from Thursday through Saturday came off smoothly and free of violence.
Vietnam Moratorium staff warmly congratulated us. Most news media reported that
the vast majority of marchers were entirely peaceful. The New York Times and
Washington Post ran front page photos and stories of the half million people
gathered for the rally and speeches at the Washington Monument. Other photos
focused on people in the March Against Death carrying names of Americans from
their home state who had been killed in Vietnam Ironically, on the day of the
march, I got caught up in pressures of phone calls in the Mobilization office
so that, even though I was the Coordinator of the March, I never got out of the
office to participate.
Two incidents at the
conclusion of the march posed additional logistical and political challenges.
As the rally at the Washington Monument ended, a few hundred marchers, led by
the radical pacifist David Dellinger, headed to the Justice Department to
engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. They were demanding an end to the trials
of anti-war activists and Black Panthers then taking place in several cities,
including the Chicago Seven trial which resulted from confrontations at the
Democratic National Convention in August 1968. Dellinger and the other
demonstrators were prepared to be arrested. They were confronted by police who,
instead of arresting them, used tear gas to disperse them. While the
demonstration at the Justice Department was a small, isolated event, the police
response created confusion and disruption for tens of thousands of marchers who
were walking back from the rally to board buses or trains to take them home.
As dusk turned to dark,
several people called the Mobilization office with urgent concern about the
growing confusion and chaos on the streets. Realizing that the situation was
becoming very dangerous, I called Deputy Attorney General Kleindienst’s office
and told the receptionist who I was. I said that there was an emergency, and I
needed to speak directly with him. She put me through. I described the
situation and asked for his help in getting the police to assist people trying
to get back to their buses and trains to go home. Kleindienst said, “What’s
happening now on the streets is not the federal government’s problem. If you
need help, you can try getting it from that ‘nigger’ Mayor.” I hung up
abruptly, called Mayor Washington and repeated word for word to him what
Kleindienst had said to me. The Mayor cursed Kleindienst, told me not to worry,
and said he would take care of the problem. Within fifteen minutes, I began
getting reports from the streets that the police had suddenly changed tactics,
and now were helping rather than hindering marchers getting to their buses.
The second incident was
humorous in retrospect, although it could have been disastrous. In the days
before the march, with all the expenses adding up, we discovered that the
Mobilization Committee was $50,000 in debt. Bradford Lyttle, an extraordinary
organizer and tactician, who years earlier had organized a walk from San Francisco
to Moscow to protest the nuclear arms race, developed a complicated, secret
plan for collecting funds at the Mobilization rally on Saturday. The plan was “secret”
because of fears, especially after the confrontation with the shadowy “local
black leaders” that the collection might be stolen by a gang, by government
agents or even by a crazy faction in the anti-war movement. The plan involved
scores of young ushers wearing distinctive arm bands and circulating through
the crowd with gallon-size cardboard collection buckets. As their bucket
filled, they were to dump the contributions into larger receptacles, which in
turn were to be brought to the back of a large rented truck, locked and guarded
from the inside by an unarmed but very well-built labor union security guy. The
plan was for Sid Peck, one of the primary leaders of the Mobilization
Committee, to drive the truck to a downtown bank where, late in the afternoon
after the rally ended, special arrangements had been made to safely deposit the
money.
The first problem was that
Sid left the keys to the truck in his jacket which he had hung on a hook inside
the back of the truck. At the end of the rally, Sid could not convince the
guard inside to let him in to get the keys. After several frustrating minutes
of loud argument through the locked door, Brad Lyttle came along to vouch for
Sid who then was able to get into the truck and get the truck keys.
The second, more serious
problem occurred as the truck approached the side entrance of the bank, where
by pre-arrangement an official was waiting to receive the Mobilization
Committee’s deposit. As the truck approached, Sid heard a noisy confrontation
at the front of the bank. He could see a contingent of police and he smelled
tear gas. While Sid was trying to deposit the Committee’s collection at the
bank’s side door, members of the radical Weathermen faction of SDS were at the
front of the bank engaged in an ugly, violent confrontation with the D.C.
police The Weathermen were wearing helmets, brandishing sticks and shouting, “Down
with the Banks!” and “Down with Imperialism!” Sid successfully managed to make
the deposit, which turned out to be a surprising $150,000, more than enough to
pay off the Committee’s debt and support ongoing Mobilization activities for
the next several months.
This rather crazy scene that,
in retrospect, I wish someone had filmed, reflected the sometimes bizarre
conflicting strategies and styles within the anti-war movement. I believed at
the time that the violent rhetoric and actions of the Weathermen and similar
small factions seriously hurt the anti-war movement. But I also came to
believe, given the persistent ugly realities of racism, the awful events of the
war, and the government’s clear determination to pursue it despite growing
popular opposition, some different and contradictory anti-war strategies and
styles were inevitable. Personally, I had no doubt that violence, the use of
drugs in peace protests, and hostile demonstrations against returning U.S.
soldiers were counterproductive.
Those strategies and actions
abandoned fundamental lessons learned from the nonviolent civil rights
movement, including the essential importance of projecting a very clear message
and seeking to win over people who hadn’t yet made up their minds or strongly
supported the war. Violent protests and drug-related actions undoubtedly
alienated many Americans who had doubts about the war, but still had not
decided to oppose it. Some of these confrontational actions may have
contributed to prolonging the war by providing arguments for the anti-war
movement’s opponents, discouraging prospective allies, and providing additional
excuses for government repression.
Those of us who believed
deeply in nonviolence, both as a matter of principle and as the best practical
strategy for social change, may be faulted during this period for not having
been bold and consistent enough in providing more creative, effective
nonviolent strategies and tactics. Given my own moral outrage over the war, I
was troubled sometimes by my lack of imagination and maybe my lack of courage
to conceive and organize more serious nonviolent action against the war.
Objectively, I recognized that part of the problem had to do with the
differences between the issues addressed by the civil rights movement and those
the anti-war movement was addressing. In protesting and sometimes engaging in
acts of civil disobedience to demand desegregation of public facilities and the
right to vote, e.g. sitting-in at lunch counters or being arrested at a voter
registration center, the connection between the protest and the change being
sought was quite clear. Moreover, in the case of civil rights, activists could
appeal directly to the Constitution to support their cause. Eventually, the
courts concluded that the Constitution supported the changes being advocated
and arguably majorities of Americans also supported them.
Challenging the Vietnam War
policies of our government was very different and more complex. Except for
young men resisting the draft, soldiers refusing to fight, and citizens
refusing to pay taxes specifically designated for the war, the connection
between acts of civil disobedience and stopping the war was less clear.
Moreover, in actions demanding basic civil rights we could appeal to people’s
sense of patriotism, while civil disobedience related to issues of war, the
draft, and foreign policy challenged, indeed for many Americans offended
deeply-ingrained popular understandings of what it meant to be patriotic. It
was also much more difficult to appeal to the Constitution for support. Massive
nonviolent civil disobedience to stop the war may have been morally
appropriate, but winning broad public support and making a legal,
Constitutional case for such action was a lot more difficult. As rage against
racism, the war and the government intensified, and many youth became
increasingly alienated, our ability as believers in nonviolence to influence,
let alone control, the forms of protest became quite limited.
In any case, public support
for the Vietnam War did steadily decline during the late sixties and early
seventies. There was a sharp drop in public support after the Tet Offensive in
January 1968, when North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front forces simultaneously
attacked a hundred cities and towns in South Vietnam and even briefly
penetrated the U.S. Embassy Compound in Saigon. A month later, Walter Cronkite
returned from Vietnam and declared the war to be unwinnable. In an
unprecedented editorial at the end of his nightly newscast Cronkite said, “It
seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to
end in a stalemate.” After hearing Cronkite’s broadcast, President Johnson is
reported to have blurted out, “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost
middle America.”
