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Title: Levitate the Pentagon (1967)
Source:
University of Illinois at Chicago
URL Source: http://www.uic.edu/orgs/cwluherstor ... freeman/photos/Pentagon67.html
Published: Sep 3, 2004
Author: Jo Freeman
Post Date: 2009-06-12 19:41:06 by Deasy
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Keywords: Mailer, Spock, LBJ, 82nd Airborne
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Comments: 1
Levitate the Pentagon (1967) Browse photos of the 1967 Pentagon March. Other participants in the Pentagon March remember Please click on thumbnails to view the complete image Crowds gather in front of the Lincoln Memorial. The Peace Torch Marathon arrives at the Mall. Dr. Benjamin Spock is in the front line of notables as it leaves the Lincoln Memorial. The front line of the march along with the lead banner are swamped by the surrounding crowd. The march line narrows to go down the service road in Virginia. By the time it reaches the Pentagon, the line has thinned. Waiting out the night. Bonfires are lit to stay warm. Defending the Pentagon Confronting the War makers Poster Comment: On Saturday, October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C., was rocked by a mass gathering. At least 100,000 people streamed into the nation’s capital that autumn weekend, most of them college-age men and women, many of them students eligible for the military draft, all there to protest the Vietnam War. At the time, about 500 soldiers were dying in Vietnam every month, and more and more Americans were coming to dispute President Johnson’s resolve to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. That weekend crowds of antiwar activists and GIs met face-to-face, and history was made. The activities of October 21 and the surrounding days were planned and organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a loose coalition of groups ranging from religious organizations to the leftist Students for a Democratic Society. Saturday’s march on the Pentagon, however, was largely the creation of one man, David Dellinger, who edited a radical journal called Liberation. With the help of the Berkeley activist Jerry Rubin, Dellinger planned to hold a huge rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before leading the assembled demonstrators across the Potomac to take up a position outside the Pentagon. Why the Pentagon, and not the White House or the Capitol? Because Rubin insisted that the Defense Department held the real reins of power. As the date approached, President Johnson consulted extensively with Attorney General Ramsey Clark about the possibility of civil unrest. Concerned about violent subversives and Communist agitators, Johnson ordered an increased military presence in the capital and even considered surrounding the White House with soldiers. He ultimately had 3,000 troops, mostly military police, and 1,800 National Guardsmen secure the Pentagon. On the antiwar side, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, of Yale University, and the novelist Norman Mailer prepared to be among the demonstrators. Mailer would later win a Pulitzer prize for his account of the protest, The Armies of the Night. On the day of the demonstration 100,000 people gathered before the Lincoln Memorial. After hours of speeches, including one by Spock declaring “the enemy is Lyndon Johnson,” roughly half of them headed across the Potomac toward the Pentagon. Walking across Arlington Memorial Bridge, they came to a halt before the headquarters of the U.S. military. Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division stood before them. Initially, and for much of the afternoon, the demonstration at the Pentagon was nonviolent. The activists staged sit-ins, sang songs, chanted antiwar slogans, and waved flags. The day’s most famous image is that of a Berkeley radical who called himself “Super Joel” approaching an armed soldier and slipping a flower into the barrel of his gun. Many of his fellow protesters followed suit. But the day was not destined to end peacefully, and by nightfall the Pentagon steps were stained with blood. As the afternoon wore on, some activists became increasingly combative, hurling insults at the soldiers and pitching rocks through the building’s windows. The protest assumed an intentionally absurd character early on, with Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Yippies, promising to levitate the Pentagon into the air, and Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, leading Tibetan chants in the hope of accomplishing exactly that feat. Ed Sanders led his band the Fugs in an “exorcism” of the building, calling on “the demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the cancerous tumors of the war generals.” But the demonstration intensified beyond those eye-catching theatrics. At several points in the afternoon, large groups of demonstrators, including one crowd numbering around 3,000, tried to break through police lines. One small group actually succeeded in entering the Pentagon. They were quickly roughed up by Pentagon security and arrested, but their entry was surely worrisome to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who watched the day’s events unfold from his office window. When the protesters’ 48-hour permit expired, police quickly dispersed most of them. By the end of the weekend, approximately 680 protesters had been jailed. Nearly 50 had been hospitalized, along with some two dozen soldiers and marshals. However, the chants sung outside the Pentagon that day echoed long after their singers left the capital. Despite the carnival-like atmosphere of much of the proceedings, the discussion over American involvement in Vietnam certainly intensified afterwards, with ever greater numbers of citizens questioning Johnson’s leadership. Some GIs began to sympathize more with the antiwar movement than with their military superiors. The weekend after the march, Democratic Congressman Morris Udall, who would one day run for President himself, reversed his previously staunch support for his own party’s foreign policy. Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon employee who watched the protests from inside the building, began questioning the war more intensely; later he would make public the Pentagon Papers, a set of documents that revealed the shocking inner workings of the U.S. war effort. A weekend of both dead seriousness and utter sillinesss left an entire nation surprised, disturbed, and debating. —Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com Must see pictures of Super Joel, who put a flower in a rifle at the Pentagon that day.
Read other partipants' accounts of the Pentagon March. 
On October 21, 1967, 70,000 demonstrators came to Washington, D.C. to "Confront the War Makers." This was the first of the biannual Anti-War demonstrations to fuse protest with the whimsicality of the counter culture and to take civil disobedience to new levels of confrontation. It would become the prototype for the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago -- except that the latter was marred by extensive police violence. Initiated and organized by "the Mobe" (the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam), a loose coalition of 150 groups, some of the events of the weekend were planned and some were not. They provided something for everyone, from committed pacifists to Vietcong sympathizers, united only by the common aim of ending the war. David Dellinger, Mobe co-ordinator and radical pacifist, asked Jerry Rubin to be project director for the march. Rubin had run the Viet Nam Day teach-in at Berkeley on May 21-22, 1965 and other anti-war actions on the west coast since then. It was his idea to target the Pentagon, but it would not be the only place of protest that weekend. The biggest rally was held at the Lincoln Monument on the D.C. Mall. During the afternoon, people lined the reflecting pool and listened to speeches. Dellinger said the time had come to go from protest to resistence. Dr. Benjamin Spock, world famous for his book on baby and child care, told the crowd that he felt betrayed by President Johnson. He had campaigned for LBJ in 1964 because he promised not to escalate the conflict in Vietnam. Four months after the election the President sent massive numbers of American troops into battle.
The rally was also the final destination of the Peace Torch Marathon. On August 6, a torch was lighted in Hiroshima, where the first atom bomb had been dropped in 1945. It was flown to San Francisco and on August 27 began its journey to Washington, D.C. On October 20, several hundred people marched to the Justice Department to turn in a thousand draft cards. They were solemnly handed to an Assistant Attorney General who initially refused to accept them. Left on a table by the delegation, eventually they were sent to local draft boards "for reappraisal." Blacks were more numerous among the rally speakers than listeners because most of the latter went to a separate rally staged near Howard University a few miles away. Rally speakers (and march organizers) were noticeably older than those in the audience. After the speeches, about 50,000 people set off for the Pentagon. It took them about an hour and a half to walk two miles across the Memorial Bridge and down a service road to the north parking lot where a second rally was scheduled. At the other end a group of hippies was trying to exorcize the Pentagon. The brainchild of Abbie Hoffman, the plan was for people to sing and chant until it levitated and turned orange, driving out the evil spirits and ending the war in Viet Nam. The Pentagon didn't move. 
While a few dozen chanted, a few thousand marchers bypassed the parking lot for the Pentagon entrance. They were met by 2,500 federal troops and 200 U.S. marshals. The troops formed a human barricade protecting the Pentagon steps. Ropes also demarcated how close the demonstrators could get. U.S. Marshals arrested anyone who got past the lines of troops, or stepped over the ropes. Those who wanted to commit civil disobedience repeatedly challenged the line. At one point a couple hundred young demonstrators charged up a vehicle ramp. They were surrounded and eventually removed. A few found an unguarded entrance used by the press and tried to invade the Pentagon. They were physically thrown out, leaving some bruised and bloody. As they bounced down the steps many more rushed up. They too were repulsed, with the help of rifle butts and a little teargas. The crowd around them sang "America the Beautiful." When the permit expired at 7:00 p.m., a couple thousand demonstrators chose to spend the night. No one forced them to leave, though many did depart as the temperature turned cold. The rest lit bonfires made from picket signs and stayed up singing, talking, and confronting the soldiers. Some protestors tried to talk to the troops facing them with sheathed bayonets; some taunted them; some put flowers in their gun barrels; some just stood and stared. When the sun rose, a few hundred people marched to the White House to wake up President Johnson with morning chants. Some were arrested for picking flowers in Lafayette Park. Most of those who spent the night at the Pentagon left on Sunday after a small afternoon demonstration. Right after midnight on Monday the couple hundred that remained at the Pentagon were arrested, for a total of 681 arrests for the weekend. One hundred were treated for injuries. This demonstration was one of several parallel actions around the world. People in six European countries, Israel, Japan and Australia marched or picketed against the presence of U.S. troops in Viet Nam. Several U.S. cities and college towns also had small demonstrations and vigils. In the next year protest against the War would spread and intensify.
Photos of the 1967 Pentagon March by Jo Freeman
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The Day The Pentagon Was Supposed to Lift Off Into Space
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20051021-pentagon-vietnam-protest-washington-dc-lyndon-johnson-jerry-rubin-david-dellinger-allen-ginsberg-yippie-robert-mcnamara.shtml
A demonstrator offers a flower to military policemen guarding the Pentagon. (NATIONAL ARCHIVES)
http://fatbillandme.blogspot.com/2009/04/protest-photos-super-joel-or-hibiscus.html
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestRahm Emanuel's Victims: Blago, Bush and Palestinian Children. The Story of Israeli Killers and Obama's Silence
Post Date: 2009-06-12 19:54:11 by Deasy
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From the first moments of my blogging I was assigned a "handler," a Jewish handler. I never met Judy Beth Yelsky but I knew people had to be assured that even if my words were trouble I was not a real threat. Along with my Jewish wife, my Jewish handler kept me in line to the extent that I was absolutely clear on my criticism of Israel in relation to any possible anti-semitism. But then came Rahm Emanuel's appointment as Obama's White House Chief of Staff; the Israeli invasion of Gaza; Obama's silence on the "murder" of so many innocent kids and my personal feelings on the the death of a young Palestinian woman.In a early valentine to Rahm Emanuel The NY ...
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