BIGGEST ANTIWAR DEMONSTRATION IN HISTORY OF WASHINGTON
Unlike Vietnam, no U.S. bombers were raining death from the bright blue skies over Washington, Saturday October 21. But nearly 200,000 demonstrators were there who had converged on the national capital from all corners of the country to demand an end to the war in Vietnam. After a rally at the Lincoln Memorial they marched to the Pentagon where thousands laid siege to the nerve center of America's military machine.
This was the largest antiwar demonstration in Washington's history. The turnout exceeded expectations. The authorities had sought to discourage attendance by spreading warnings that any disorderly conduct would be sternly handled by the thousands of armed troops called up to guard the world's biggest military establishment. While this scare propaganda may have kept some older people from Washington, it spurred the militancy of the youth and brought them out in greater numbers.
Unlike the peace march in Washington’ a year ago, which had a middle-aged composition, this assemblage was dominated by youth. They flocked to Washington from campuses and cities across the country, thanks in good measure to the organizing work of the Student Mobilization Committee. In Boston, for example, 900 more students applied for transportation the night before than could be accommodated on the chartered buses.
The program began with a massive meeting around the reflecting pool at the Lincoln Memorial where the atmosphere was, as one participant commented, "more like a celebration than a demonstration." At 2:15 p.m. the march leaders set off for the Pentagon two miles across the Potomac River. The crowds flowed across the bridge to the Pentagon for three hours. A second meeting was held in a parking lot close to the Pentagon.
From 4 p.m. on, thousands of demonstrators set siege to the entrance of the colossal structure. One had planted a National Liberation Front flag on the terrace.
Defense of the Pentagon had been converted into a major military operation. U.S. Army Chief of Staff Harold K. Johnson issued a memorandum to all members of his task force which stated: "We will have the United States and the rest of the world watching to see how well we do these jobs." The government stationed 5,000 troops to guard the Pentagon and had 1,800 National Guards, 2,000 policemen, and 300 Federal Marshals on hand in addition. This was the first time federal troops had been assigned to Washington since President Hoover used
them to crush the Bonus Marchers at the depth of the depression in 1931.
The army paratroopers flown into Washington were the same that had been sent to suppress the black uprisings in Detroit last July and to Santo Domingo in 1965. The day before, Senator Stennis of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee, called on Defense Secretary McNamara to use "the same resolution in dealing with the protesters as American troops are doing in Vietnam." McNamara watched the demonstrators from his office in the Pentagon where he was in constant communication all day with the White House.
The Federal Marshals, backed by soldiers armed with bayonet-tipped rifles, drove back the demonstrators who tried to enter the Pentagon. Six who succeeded in getting through a side door reserved for the press were quickly ejected. Three hundred seventy-five persons were arrested, including the pacifist leader David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the novelist Norman Mailer, and Dagmar Wilson, a founder of the Women's Strike for Peace.
Although it was played up most prominently in the press, these direct actions were a separate part of the day's program. The overwhelming majority of the marchers did not participate in then. This included the black contingent who later held their own rally across the street from Howard University, the black campus a few miles from the capitol.
Dellinger opened the meeting at the Lincoln Memorial by asserting that "this begins a new stage in the American peace movement in which the cutting edge becomes active resistance." As the British union leader, Clive Jenkins, general secretary of the large white-collar union ASSET [Association of Supervisory Staffs, Executives and Technicians], started to speak, three members of the American Nazi party came from behind and tumbled the podium and microphones down the stone steps. Demonstrators prevented them from breaking up the program and police led them away as they shouted: "Heil Hitler!"
Jenkins told the crowd that a majority of the labor movement in Britain, by action of both the Trade Union Congress and Labour party, are now morally and formally against the Vietnam war and Wilson's complicity with Washington. "Our task now is to prod the Labour Government to proceed along these lines." Emphasizing the international scope of the antiwar movement, he observed that his speech was being transmitted on a telephone hookup to five cities in Western Europe.
Dr. Benjamin Spock, a prominent
peace advocate, declared that "the real
enemy" is Lyndon Johnson "whom we elected
as a peace candidate in 1964 and who be-
trayed us within three months, who has
stubbornly led-us deeper and deeper into
a bloody quagmire in which uncounted hun-
dreds of thousands of Vietnamese men,
women and children have died, and 13,000
young Americans, too."
John Wilson, New York director
of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee LSNCC], asked for a moment of
silence to mark the death of Ernesto Che
Guevara. "Che" appeared as the hero of
the radical youth. One bore a sign with
the slogan "Che lives forever! "; another
"Avenge Che." Some shouted "Viva Che" as
they advanced on the Pentagon. Almost a
thousand of the commemorative posters with
his portrait, published by the Young So-
cialist Alliance, were sold at the rally.
The central slogan of the mobiliza-—
tion was inscribed on the big banner be-
hind the speakers platform: "Immediate
Withdrawal of U.S. Troops; Vietnam for the
Vietnamese." But the marchers carried a
wide diversity of slogans. Among them:
"Ladybird, what kind of natural beauty is
a bomb crater?"; "War is good business,
invest your son"; "Yankees, Come Home";
and "Where is Oswald when we need him?"
The National Mobilization Committee
is a loose coalition of scores of groups
united only in their opposition to the
war. It includes elements ranging from
moderate pacifists and anti~Johnson Demo-
crats to the extreme left. The rebuff of
attempts made before the march to disrupt
the movement by red-baiting shows how firm
the resistance is in the antiwar movement
to any reversion to MeCarthyisn.
All shades of radical opinion par-
ticipated in the Washington action except
for that ultrasectarian relic, the Social-
ist Labor party, which condemned the dem-
onstration as aiding the war-makers be-
cause it did not have explicitly socialist
objectives. The Socialist Workers party
and Young Socialist Alliance delegations
bore identifying banners from numerous
cities and campuses. So did the Communist
party contingent.
Despite the priority in the pub-
licity accorded the idea of individual
civil disobedience over the broadest
mobilization of all antiwar elements, which
tended to narrow participation in the ac-
tion, the magnitude of the turnout demon-
strated the growth of the antiwar moods
in the country. This sentiment has not
only expanded in scope but become more
radical. Many of the demonstrators were
not only opposed to the war but favored
victory for the National Liberation Front.
The sit-in at the Pentagon lasted
all night and the following day.
A WEEK OF ANTIWAR PROTEST ACTIONS IN THE U.S.
The weekend mobilization in the national capital was preceded by a Stop the Draft Week in which