6

Sitting In and Armies of the Night

Once Amy and I arrived back in Massachusetts, the immediate task was signing up people to go to Washington for what we hoped would be the biggest demonstration yet against the war—the March on the Pentagon. That march had its origin in James Bevel’s surprise announcement in New York the previous spring. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, or the “Mobe” as we called it, was a coalition of hundreds of groups. SDS had an uneasy relationship with the coalition. While we would consistently participate in the marches, turning out large numbers of students and young people, the “Mobe” was mired in complicated coalitional politics that we had no patience for. Pointless jockeying for position, protracted negotiations that would produce silly, long lists of “demands” and slogans for each march, as if anyone cared what was printed on the placards, what was chanted, or what was written in leaflets that rarely got read. The march itself was what mattered. That sea of humanity bursting out of the diurnal routine to say, “Stop this war or we will crack normality wide open.”

American causalities were mounting. The future promised only greater and greater violence, more troops, more bombs, more napalm, more tragedy. That fall of 1967, the pace of protest picked up. October 16 we were back to the Arlington Street Church, where an overflow crowd of close to 5,000 heard calls for draft resistance by Dr. Benjamin Spock, Reverend Sloan Coffin and Michael Ferber, a local Boston activist, and witnessed the burning of draft cards. This time the counterprotestors were small in number and overwhelmed by our crowds.

Then it was on to Washington. All fall we had been renting buses, spending endless hours convincing people who were on the fence to get on the bus. We were overwhelmed by the last-minute rush of students who signed up. The tide was steadily shifting on campuses. That October 21 march brought 100,000 people to Washington to protest the war.¹ The chaotic mix of students, radicals, liberals, housewives (a common term in those years), pacifists, and clergy roiled down the streets of Washington, and snaked toward the Pentagon, the five-sided nerve center of the war itself.

While there was some Black participation, the protestors were overwhelmingly white—and young. Among us was a contingent of counterculture performers, writers, artists, and poets—Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, the experimental rock band the Fugs—who planned a theater of the absurd to confront an absurd reality. They promised to levitate the Pentagon. The march also brought to prominence two acquaintances of mine: Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Jerry was a leading activist in the Bay Area who had been at the center of many demonstrations, from the Free Speech Movement through intense and large antiwar protests. I had met him at a national SDS meeting and immediately disliked him, finding him self-promoting. Dave Dellinger and the other leaders of the “Mobe” had turned to Jerry to staff the October march. He joined forces with Abbie.

With the gift of a showman’s shtick, Abbie was ten years older than me. I had first met him when he had been a SNCC supporter. He had studied with the political theorist Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis, then worked with SNCC and opened a small store in his hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, to support civil rights work. I had hired him to be our lead Worcester organizer for the Adams campaign. Abbie had at some point connected with Peter Coyote and the Diggers. I chuckle now when I hear the sonorous voice of Coyote narrating documentaries, the Winter Olympics, or ads for Apple. Abbie quickly grasped the media opportunities that the Diggers’ anarchist theater and radical performances could create. Soon he and Jerry would become a tandem leadership team for what they called the Youth International Party, an organization that did not exist. As “Yippies” they were soon garnering way more press coverage than our more prosaic and boring efforts.

Levitating the Pentagon was too frivolous for me. Nor was I drawn to the civil disobedience that resulted in over 500 arrests. I did not think our job was to make gestures. Our job was to build a movement too large to be denied.

Outside the Pentagon I had a glimpse of a troubling future. Many of my fellow SDS members from around the country, particularly those from the militant Columbia SDS chapter, seemed to think that the brief siege of the Department of Defense headquarters by tens of thousands of protestors was an exercise in guerilla warfare. They formed small groups, talked about a strategy of hit and run, and referred to the writings of the French intellectual Régis Debray who had been with Che Guevara in Bolivia. As I caught periodic glimpses of them outside of the massive building ringed with heavily armed soldiers, they seemed oddly out of touch with the reality of the moment. Engaging in child’s play, revolutionary fantasies we could ill afford. We had a war to end.

Amy and I were part of the tens of thousands who marched on the Pentagon as it was protected by a stolid line of soldiers and military police from the 82nd Airborne. As some protestors in their small collectives looked for ways to breach the wall of soldiers, most of us milled around as young women, and a few young men, periodically approached unsmiling soldiers to insert a flower in the gun barrels, more often than not winning a brief, sheepish smile. Other protestors attempted to engage soldiers in discussion and dialogue. The usual few over amped and aggressive young men harangued the hapless GIs on the evils of the war and their duty to oppose it. As time passed, tensions lessened. Most of the thousands of protestors settled into conversations, chants, and songs. Inside the Pentagon, thousands of soldiers were held in reserve.²

I was excited by the numbers—our largest turnout to date. We had gone from 25,000 in DC in April 1965 to 100,000 two and a half years later. Clearly, we were growing.

That night outside the Pentagon, the protestors still numbered in the tens of thousands. Skirmishes broke out. The self-conceived guerrillas mounted probes of the perimeter, found a few weak spots, and following their lead, crowds would surge in to be met by US Marshals determined to prevent anyone from breaching the outer walls of the war center itself. Those who committed civil disobedience were hauled off and protested that they were badly abused by the marshals. Later soldiers and marshals would recount tales of verbal and physical abuse: bottles and bags of shit hurled at them. I did not see any of the abuse on either side as by nightfall we were no longer on the front lines. Amy and I headed back to Cambridge, excited by the numbers and determined to find a way to keep up the momentum.

Despite massive coverage of the march, the war rolled on, a machine seemingly impervious to everything we did. The evening news and morning papers brought new and horrific images of towers of flame, hurricanes of fire—the destruction of napalm. Napalm became a searing image, symbol, and reality of the war.

Napalm was invented for use as a weapon in 1942 in a secret lab at Harvard and its first trial tests were held on the Harvard athletic fields.³ It is jellied gasoline that, when dropped from the air, explodes on impact, generating a storm system of flames. The winds generated reach seventy miles per hour.⁴ The temperatures rise to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. It sticks, clings to skin and clothes, spreads, and burns. Around 388,000 tons of napalm were dropped on Indochina from 1963 to 1973.⁵ Each barrel bore the stamp of the Dow Chemical Company.

On October 18 SDS led a peaceful sit in against a Dow recruiter at the University of Wisconsin. The protestors were violently attacked by police. Less than a week later, another recruiter was scheduled to visit Harvard. We were determined to not allow the university to welcome a company making an immoral weapon to fight an unjust war. Five hundred people rallied in Harvard Yard as we called for a picket line outside of the Dow recruiters’ location when they arrived on campus.

On the morning of October 25—just four days after the Pentagon march—more than 200 of us first set up a picket line and then I led us inside to jam the narrow hall outside Room 233 in the Conant Chemistry Lab building where a small, neatly dressed recruiter from Dow is starting his interviews. We fill the narrow hallway making it difficult for anyone to get in or out. The deans arrive and chastise us for improper behavior and ask us to disperse. We politely refuse and continue to sit in the hall. At 10:30 when the first recruiter leaves, a second takes his place. It quickly dawns on us that the second recruiter was a decoy. No one is attempting to wade through us for an interview. Scouts fan out and soon locate the first Dow man, Fred Leavitt, continuing to interview in the building next door. We immediately move the entire demonstration next door and block access in and out of the room.

Now we have a gaggle of deans talking with us. We debate what to do. We know that the university will charge us with violating the rules. From the way the deans are talking to us, they will seek suspension or perhaps expulsion if we stay. But now we are committed and annoyed that the university was so committed to Dow recruiting that it had a decoy. It is time for us to stop the wheels of the war machine from turning even if it is just for this one day in this one minor way.

No one can get through us to see the recruiter. We agree that those who want to, will give me their “bursar’s cards”—the way a student paid for meals and other services, and is identified by the university. I will hand them to a dean at the right time—a clear statement that we will take full responsibility for our actions. We know we are breaking university rules, and we are prepared to take the consequences for this civil disobedience.

University officials decide to try to move Leavitt once again. As they start stepping over and around seated students, a group of us stand up and link arms. We say no one is leaving until Leavitt signs a statement that says, “I agree to stop interviewing on the Harvard campus and not return for that purpose.” There is then an exchange with Leavitt, who we rather rudely harangue about napalm and the war. Leavitt’s response is that he did not know enough about the war or Dow’s policies to answer our questions. He is a research scientist, not a policymaker and not management. One of us yells out that we should stop badgering the poor guy. We all feel chagrined. He is a symbol, the wrong person in the wrong place, with his thin tie and pencil protector. We do not want to mistreat him. Still, we hold fast—there will be no recruiting for Dow and since he has already tried the decoy once, he cannot leave unless he signs the pledge. Soon he returns into the room.

Now our numbers are growing. Word of what is happening is spreading. Leavitt is sitting bored with no one to interview. The hallway swarms with even more deans. I inform them that they can come and go but Leavitt can leave only when he signs the pledge to stop recruiting.

The deans are horrified. This is not the way the gentlemen and women of Harvard behave. Dean Fred Glimp reads out sections of the “Rules Relating to College,” demanding that we stop “illegally incarcerating” Leavitt, and immediately stop disrupting the normal functioning of the university. If we do not, we will be subject to “severance of connection”—Harvard’s language for expulsion. Glimp says we are not allowed to threaten another person by holding him hostage. That elicits a yelled, “Is that a threat?” Everyone, including Glimp, laughs.

I explain that we are nonviolent, but we will stay and passively block anyone from coming in to be interviewed or Leavitt from leaving. Glimp says the deans would like to talk individually to each of us. My response is that they must deal with us as a group—and I hand him 150 bursar’s cards. We are taking full responsibility for our actions, I tell him. This war is immoral. He should know that. Napalm is immoral. How could they, Harvard, the deans, support either? Dropping napalm is a war crime. There can be no support for war crimes, no matter how indirect. Anyone with a conscience must take a stand. That means us. That meant the university. That means here. Now. If not us, who? If not now, when?

All afternoon deans, house masters, senior tutors, all the factotums of the university, come by. Word continues to spread about what is happening. Our numbers swell. More importantly, even students who could not join the sit-in send over their bursar’s cards. Throughout the afternoon I periodically hand over another batch to the perplexed administrators. Increasingly non-SDS students turn in the cards as support spreads: the head of the Young Democrats turns in his card, the head of the official Undergraduate Council turns in his card. In the end more than 400 students turn in their cards.

The administration vacillates about what to do. They alert the Cambridge police who prepare 150 officers ready to dislodge us. We reiterate our determination to stay and our determination to be nonviolent and to accept the consequences of our actions. We provide lunch to the beleaguered Dow recruiter.

Finally, as afternoon turns into evening, we say we have accomplished what we had set out to accomplish. There was no recruiting that day, and Leavitt helpfully tells us he is not coming back. Glimp sternly reiterates that we are in deep trouble. We are feeling good. We decide to let Leavitt leave. We meet for our usual inefficient two hours’ postaction evaluation and next step discussion, formulating a clear set of demands for the university. They are considering how to punish us. We demand that they change their policies on recruitment. After all, the CIA was scheduled to come recruit the following week.

In the next days, the university is in turmoil. The press blares the news of radical antiwar action at Harvard. Students and faculty at other Boston area colleges write letters supporting us. Debate rages. And whenever debate rages, even if it starts with the inappropriateness of our actions, people are forced to engage with the issue of the war. The more people engage the facts of the war, the more people steadily come over to our side.

The bursar’s card strategy, an inspired improvisation, becomes a serious challenge for the deans and president Nathan Pusey. The 400-plus students who turned in their cards are saying, “If you punish them, you have to punish me.” There is no question about our act of civil disobedience: by taking full and open responsibility for our actions we are clearly saying “Yes, we broke university rules, but we broke them following a greater moral imperative.” It allows us to focus on why we broke the rules. We made no argument that the university could not punish us if they so choose. Instead, we argued that while we broke the rules, the university should stop being complicit in the manufacture of a terrible weapon being used in a hideous manner in an unjust and tragic war. We could see posted in the Office of Career Plans notices for recruitment interviews not just with Dow but also with dozens of companies making money from their essential participation in the war.

President Pusey, a gentleman tragically disconnected from his students and from the real passions and issues of the times, is firm in his insistence that the university must severely punish the demonstrators. Our actions have been to him a clear violation of the “freedom of expression or movement of others.”⁶ Following the McNamara demonstration, the deans felt that they had to make a stand.

They take the issue to a raucous faculty meeting. Many of the faculty could only see our actions through the lens of “McCarthyism of the Left.” At the same time a significant group of the faculty was troubled by having to discipline so many students who clearly acted out of a moral passion. There is a growing number of professors who are now opposed to the war, George Wald, Hilary Putnam, Carl Sagan, Michael Walzer, and Jack Womack argue our case. The deans argue strenuously for selecting at least those students who blocked the doors. There was no question, for example, of my role or the role of other SDS leaders. Our pictures were there for all to see in the Crimson. In the end the faculty produced a shockingly moderate set of actions: seventy-four of us were placed on probation for the semester; the administration had pushed for “severance” and was unhappy with probation, but there was nothing they could do, having taken it to the faculty. All the others who turned in their bursar’s cards were not punished in any way. Furthermore, the faculty voted to create a Student–Faculty Advisory Council to deal with the issues that we had raised, review campus recruitment policies, and the role of the university in the war.

In the coming weeks and months, on every campus where Dow sent a recruiter, students protested, often sitting in. We were excited by our success. We thought, as we framed it then, that we had started to move from protest into resistance.

In the run up to the March on the Pentagon, a group of prominent intellectuals, writers and clergy had issued a powerful “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” which made the case that the war was immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional.⁷ All the signers pledged to do everything that they could to support those who resisted the draft and those in the military who refused to serve. We all began to debate what resistance meant. Resistance harked back to the famed French effort against German occupation. Resistance would mean our movement would directly seek to disrupt the processes necessary for the war: encourage resistance to the draft, force universities to disengage from all entanglements with the war, shut down recruitment for war companies, find increasingly serious ways to disrupt the everyday systems supporting the war, start exacting—through disruption—a real cost for continuing the war. We were both desperate and excited.

We conveniently forgot that the meeting to plan the Dow action had chosen a picket line and rejected a sit-in. We never discussed that I had led people into a direct action that had not been planned. Exciting direct action has its own dynamic.

While we would work on other issues, supporting the welfare mothers of MAW, against American support of apartheid in South Africa, for more student say in university decisions, assisting a union drive at a local hospital, even helping the Maverick Street Mothers protest airport expansion in East Boston, the war was inescapable. Always the war. It ground on without mercy or respite. We were convinced that now more than ever was the time moral people must fling themselves into the gears and onto the wheels to bring the machinery of war to a stop. From protest to resistance. But how, that was the question that bore down on us, how to bring those grinding wheels and gears of death to a halt?

Postscript: in November 1969, Dow declared that it would stop manufacturing napalm for the United States government. Dow’s chairman of the board, Carl Gerstacker, explained, “We may have lost some recruits that we really would have wanted, we may have lost some sales that we otherwise would have had, we may have lost some stockholders that would otherwise have purchased our stock. The number of Dow shareholders dropped from 95,000 to 90,000 during the Napalm demonstrations although only a couple dozen stockholders specifically informed us that they were selling because of Napalm. We suspect a good many of the 5,000 we lost reacted at least in part to the Napalm stories, but we have no way of determining just how many.” ⁸

Late in 1967, Tom Hayden, and Rennie Davis came to town to drum up support for massive demonstrations in Chicago at the Democratic Convention the coming summer. As a dozen of us crowded into the small living room of a dingy Cambridgeport apartment, Tom and Rennie made the case that all eyes would be on Chicago for the coronation of Lyndon B. Johnson. We must not let the Democratic Party pretend there is no war, evade their responsibility for it. Vietnam was LBJ’s war. There must be no business as usual, no politics as usual. We must not allow the war to remain remote, over there, only on the TV. We needed to make it real, felt, present in the streets of Chicago. We must bring 50,000 people to Chicago.

I was initially all in. We formed an organizing committee for New England. We all agreed: each day, the evening news brought the horrific nature of the war into our living rooms. We needed to summon the nation to protest. We planned to “bring the war home” to the streets of Chicago.

Over the next months, as I talked repeatedly with Tom and Rennie about the planning, I began to feel queasy about what might happen. I had a sense that they were willing to provoke an extreme police response. All my friends were itching for a battle. With blood being spilled every day 3,000 miles away, all of us felt desperate. We knew the reputation of the Chicago police. We knew that they too were itching for a fight. I was concerned because we were not being clear about the risks. We were recruiting people to participate in a peaceful protest that I worried would not stay peaceful if the Chicago police had anything to do with it. I was bothered enough that I tried to talk to Tom. He dismissed my worries and made it clear that we would bring the war to the streets of Chicago, the risks be damned, and there would be no change in our messaging.

I did not want to sabotage the effort. Still, I had pictures in my mind of peaceful demonstrators being set upon by police. I felt as if I would be deceiving people. I quietly disengaged from the planning group and stopped attending the meetings; decided not to go to Chicago. I would not recruit anyone to go. But I would not argue with anyone who wanted to go.

As winter lined the streets with dirty snow and 1967 drew to a close, it was undeniable that our antiwar movement had successfully grown larger and bolder. We could feel that we were slowly, steadily shaping opinion on America’s campuses. We knew that the elites were worried about our influence. Still the war ground on, each day bringing more death. Each day we felt the pressure to do more. Increasingly antiwar leaders searched for strategies of resistance, whatever that actually meant, not mere protest. The interracial unity of the early civil rights days was frayed if not totally gone. Anger was growing. Anger throughout Black America. Anger among the young as well, a separate anger but no less real. Underneath our youthful exuberance, there was also a growing undercurrent of dread that we refused to put into words, perhaps something, some rough beast its hour come round at last, was slouching toward Bethlehem. We felt an unarticulated foreboding, but we did not yet realize the blood-dimmed tide that would be 1968.