Jeremy Varon (24 page)

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We own half the world, oh say can you see

The name for our profits is democracy

So like it or not you will have to be free

‘Cause we’re the Cops of the World, boys

We’re the Cops of the World

Phil Ochs, “Cops of the World”

The November demonstration was a series of events stretching over three days, in which the initiative toggled between the peaceful majority and the militant minority. The “March against Death” began the protest on Thursday evening. Buses from all over the country deposited demonstrators, noticeably young, at the west end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge. There, they were given candles and placards bearing the name of an American GI killed in Vietnam or a Vietnamese village attacked by the United States. They marched for two and a half hours, often in rain and hail, to the White House, where they read the names on their placards into a microphone. The march ended at the Capitol, where to the beat of a drum, they dropped their placards into coffins adorned with flowers. Forty-five thousand people completed the march, which lasted forty hours.28

In the March against Death, the antiwar movement conveyed its message of peace in the starkest terms: youthful eros marching past the masters of war, life protesting death. The march’s solemnity and quiet determination was a moving experience for its participants and deeply impressed the mainstream press. Yet for some on the left, the march seemed depressingly futile. The Liberation News Service commented that it didn’t

tell you where to go from here, how to fight against this abomination. But still somehow it was impressive. Macabre, deathly and medieval, making 126

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you think of a society in decay, plague-stricken or destroyed by famine or war. And it made you think too about the kids . . . many of whom didn’t really know where the war had come from or what to do about it other than offer up their sense of sorrow. It seemed strange that they could really think their frail candles would affect the power that rested comfortably behind [the White House’s] blinding floodlights.29

The column lamented not only the naïveté of the marchers but, more fundamentally, the seeming exhaustion of the forms of protest and the symbolism on which the movement had so long relied.

Friday evening spotlighted the militants. The Weathermen vacillated on their role in the protest to the bitter end, first trying a scheme of extortion. On Thursday, Ayers and three other Weathermen, desperately needing money for the group, marched into the offices of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee and demanded $20,000.30 In return, Weatherman would refrain from violence the following night. Turned away by incredulous VMC representatives, the Weathermen then geared up for battle. On Friday, several thousand demonstrators tried to march from Dupont Circle to the South Vietnamese Embassy. They met a blockade of policemen, who fired tear gas at them. Marchers retaliated by throwing rocks, bottles, and bricks. Weathermen and others broke windows and started small fires. The melée did not have the aggressiveness of the Days of Rage, and the Weathermen privately complained that the demonstration was too timid.31 Yet something of the fighting spirit that Weatherman had quickly come to symbolize surfaced within the crowd. “People who had six weeks ago called us crazy adventurists were now running in the streets with VC flags and smashing windows,” Weatherman proudly observed.32 The
Quicksilver Times
concluded from the battle that

“many demonstrators [who] had peacefully marched for years . . . finally learned that peaceful marches would not end the war. . . . They now understand, ‘You don’t need a weatherman.’”33 New Mobe leaders, fearing that the violence of a small minority would discredit their protest, disclaimed the Dupont Circle action.34

The New Mobe demonstration on Saturday drew more than half a million people in Washington and several hundred thousand in San Francisco, making it the largest concentrated antiwar demonstration up to that point. In the capital, the majority of the demonstrators were young, white, and middle class, prompting comparisons with the summer’s gathering at Woodstock. For hours, they marched, rallied, sang, and listened to speeches, while Military Police in Army jeeps roamed the streets near the Mall. Placards ranged from the straightforward (“Peace Now”)

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to the earnest (“Computer Professionals for Peace”), the insistent (“Return to Sanity”), the clever (“Save Lives, Not Face”), and the brazen (“Agnew—Shut Up!”).35

The tremendous size and urgency of the protest made it a compelling political statement, like the March against Death. Yet it too pulsed with a tension of hope and despair. The New Left reporter Sherry Reeder compared the protest to the medieval Children’s Crusade led by Peter the Hermit to regain the Holy Land from the Muslims. “Very much like the earlier crusade,” she observed, “the youth that gathered in Washington were there for a purpose without a real means of gaining that which they sought. . . . Chanting the holy word of peace, the largest youth crusade in history started down the Mall to recapture the land of Amerika for the people. [Among the crowd] there prevailed that beautiful faith in believing that something can be done.” Upon reaching the Mall, the sense of expectancy was dampened by endless speeches to the converted. Reeder commended the singer Arlo Guthrie—son of the folk legend Woody Guthrie and a great balladeer for justice in his own right—for his desperate admission from the speakers’ platform: “I don’t need to say anything. It’s all been said before.” In an echo of Weatherman’s rhetoric, Reeder concluded her report forebodingly: “Was anyone [in power] listening after all, or is it true that, as one demonstrator’s placard proclaimed: ‘This is the last march, the fire next time.’”36

The novelist Sol Yurick had come from Brooklyn with a rag-tag group of working-class youths, who, in a makeshift collective, shared their frustrations with the war, their economic prospects, and their frequent harassment by police. Seeing the plaintive mass of demonstrators, Yurick thought of the “workers of St. Petersburg in 1905 led by Father Gapon, petitioning the Little Father for redress and bread and getting shot for their faith.”37 From the rote speeches and peace songs, he concluded that, in five years, “We’ve gone nowhere.” Yurick’s image of the vulnerability of the mass turned into one of its power—if it had defied the Mobe leaders and loosed itself in violent rage:

I think that we were very close . . . close enough to terrify even those who hated the war but believed in the system . . . and were fighting against the war that they had supported last year because they were no longer making money from it. Who knows what hurried conferences took place, who knows what their estimation of the danger was . . . If we had all to run, to charge, we could have swept those sentries aside like nothing . . . and stormed through that white mausoleum of American dreams till we came to that figure, crouching by the T.V. doing magical obeisance to a quiescent 128

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and absent public that gave him life, and we could have torn the heart out of that manifestation of an old America . . . they knew it better than we did. It was close: we were all there: we might have done it: they know it: we blew it.38 [ellipses his]

A small contingent chanting “War, war, one more war, revolution now”

had in fact tried to break through the line of marshals and rush the White House, but to no effect.39 Yurick, having flickered between fantasies of tragedy and triumph, left the march with a sense of wasted opportunity.

“Fire” came in the early evening as thousands of protesters broke away from the main demonstration and set out for the Justice Department. Some demonstrators marched behind a banner reading “Power to the People”

over a Black Power fist; further back was a banner for the “Nat Turner Brigade.” Among the sea of Viet Cong flags, signs read “Stop the Trial,”

“Beat Nixon into Ploughshares,” and “The People of Vietnam Have Made Their Choice—Support the NLF!” The Weathermen felt like kings for the day. Jim Mellen recalls that thousands of people “did the same thing we did [in Chicago] in front of the Justice Department. . . . [I] hollered, ‘Let’s go this way,’ and, Jesus, you should see the crowd that followed me. The reason they followed me was because I was a Weatherman.”40

Yet the same tensions that plagued the Days of Rage were present in Washington. As the crowd made its way toward the Justice Department, Mellen recalled:

It was an astonishing situation. People thought that we were really revolutionary heroes and that we were greater than life. We went down this street and we surrounded a black motorcycle policeman. . . . so many people you couldn’t even see them all. . . . [H]e pulled his gun out and pointed at me and said, “If you guys comes one step closer I’ll shoot!!”

All these people . . . really thought we were just going to overwhelm this policeman and take away his gun from him. I thought this was madness because not only might he shoot me, but also, he was a forlorn character.

Why would you want to hurt this guy? He was scared to death. . . . [A] lot of people were asking me afterward, “Why didn’t you off that pig?”41

As the crowd traversed a commercial district, demonstrators smashed store windows and even beat up a random shopper because they were

“so inflamed with the idea of doing something.”42

When at the Justice Department, some protesters tacked “Building Condemned” signs on the building’s enormous, medieval doors. Others stoned the edifice and smashed windows with red flags, providing the week’s second image of a society in turmoil. At one point several helmeted demonstrators—Weathermen or Weatherman-types—took down

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the American flag from the building’s flagpole and put the Viet Cong flag in its place. Police quickly restored the original flag, keeping guard over it in battle-ready posture. Rows of police in riot gear soon moved in to clear the area. Tear gas wafted into the upper floors of the building, where officials nervously watched the riot. Attorney General John Mitchell reported that he felt as if he were witnessing the storming of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg in 1917.43

The fall protests, though designed to present an image of unity, exacerbated existing divisions within the antiwar movement. Some activists stressed the importance of bringing large numbers of people into the movement and, in the wake of such a show of force, appealing once more to the relevant powers to end the war. Within the framework of those goals, New Mobe leaders declared the protest a resounding success, despite Nixon’s insistence that he would not be affected by it and the boycott of the protests by the great majority of Congress.44 The New Mobe highlighted the “beauty and meaning” of moments of peaceful togetherness, such as the “quiet and self-discipline” of those waiting to participate in the March against Death and the “joyful swaying of uncounted thousands” singing “Give Peace a Chance.”45 Other activists with broader ambitions saw the antiwar movement as an opportunity for building a mass socialist base in the United States and accepted the need for strategic alliance with antiwar liberals. The
Guardian,
for instance, praised the New Mobe’s efforts at building a coalition and denounced the

“left-wing adventurism” of those committing violence. But the
Guardian
warned also of the movement’s susceptibility to the “right-wing opportunism” of liberals that threatened to submerge anti-imperialist politics within the movement. Both extremes, it felt, reflected the “pessimism and frustration” of a left that had failed to build a sizable anti-imperialist following.46

A final strain in the movement, though internally divided on the ideal form and ultimate ends of militancy, advocated direct action to impede the actual prosecution of the war and provoke a broader sense of political crisis. In postmortems on the march by the radical left, anger with the antiwar leadership at times rivaled anger over the war itself. To Abbie Hoffman, the demonstration looked like “a huge mess begging the president, the state department, the pentagon, all these war criminals ‘Just Give Peace a Chaaance. . . . ’” Criticizing both the restraint of the New Mobe and what he saw as the planned violence of the Weathermen, Hoffman celebrated the spontaneous violence of Yippies and others as an authentic expression of political anger. He declared, “You cannot express 130

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outrage at the policies of the Amerikan government by raising a V [peace]

sign. Outrage takes on meaning when you see someone throwing a rock through a window.”47 In the days following the march, an insurgent, youth-dominated “Radical Caucus” within the New Mobe pushed for a campaign of massive civil disobedience.48 At an extreme, the Weathermen concluded with some merit that the “most important tension” in the demonstration was not over the war but over “the question of violence.” Jeering at those who pleaded for peace in an orderly fashion, the Weathermen gloried in their Dionysian romp in Washington, in which they “moved through the streets in groups, marching, dancing, running, chanting, singing, downing jugs of wine.”49 The group’s main “commentary” on the protest was a multipage cartoon in
FIRE!
showing smil-ing, helmeted Weathermen marauding through the city.

Judging from these assessments of the protest, each grouping appeared certain of the superiority of its approach, resented the others for jeop-ardizing its efforts, and battled for the allegiance of antiwar protesters.

At the heart of the division, viewed less in ideological than in strategic terms, lay the question of whether the movement was to succeed by using the legal, democratic channels available to it or, by recognizing the limitations of those channels, “bringing the war home.” The
Washington Post
’s editorials praised the peacefulness of most demonstrators, gushed over the D.C. police’s purported restraint, denounced those carrying VC flags and throwing rocks as hatemongers, and mentioned the Weathermen only to dismiss them as extremists.50 Yet the
Post
columnist Nicholas von Hoffman all but predicted “fire” if Nixon ignored the protesters’ pleadings: