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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: resistance/propaganda circa 1967 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 since 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.
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#1. To: kiki (#0)
Good story - thank you - hard to believe that was forty years ago...I was a sophomore in college...
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