Tag: Moratorium

The Vietnam Moratorium, 40 Years Ago Today

Time Magazine Moratorium It wasn’t that long ago – not really.  Thousands of us singing “All we are saying, is give peace a chance” on the Mall in Washington.   It all started when Sam Brown, David Hawk, David Mixner, Marge Sklenkar, John Gage and other peace luminaries, many of whom were veterans of the failed McCarthy and Kennedy campaigns, decided to call a “moratorium on the war in Vietnam” and ask everyone to come to Washington to support it.  It was a great idea: a kind of strike against the war, but with manners.

And 250,000 came, followed by at least 500,000 exactly a month later, during the November Moratorium that followed.   But on this day, a manageable and peaceful crew assembled.  My memories of the day are scattered.  I worked for CBS News by then and my job was to keep track of the march, marchers and plans for all the peace activity going on in the capital.  There was plenty, in a wide spectrum of militancy and affect.

I wish I could describe for you some of the more radical “peace houses” I visited; collectives with tie died cloth covering the windows and mattresses on the floor – working for a much tougher way to oppose the war.

Organizers and participants in this march , though, slept in church basements and the homes of local people who made room for them.  Everyone who lived in Washington didn’t have a spare bed or couch – or inch of space on the floor.  You know this, but just to remind you, listen to what the BBC says about that time “in context:

American combat troops had been fighting the Communist Viet Cong in Vietnam since 1965.

Some 45,000 Americans had already been killed by the end of 1969. Almost half a million US men and women were deployed in the conflict, and opposition to the war was growing.

The Moratorium for the first time brought out America’s middle class and middle-aged voters, in large numbers. Other demonstrations followed in its wake.

I guess that song is what I remember most – that, and members of the Chicago 7, out on bail as they awaited trial, addressing the crowd and pulling off wigs to show how their jailers had cut off all their hair.  For some reason, I can still see that – it felt to me like such a violation.  A less than friendly observer asked me later “How did you like what they did to “your friends” huh?  They weren’t my friends; I barely knew them, but the question was a punch in the gut.  So many things stood for other things then. Long hair on men meant rebellion and outlier.

Anyway, it’s yet another 40 year anniversary and I didn’t feel that I could let it go un-noted.

If you have never heard the Lennon song “Give Peace a Chance” here are John and Yoko singing it with a crew of friends during a peace “bed in” in, I believe, Amsterdam.  Happy Anniversary

ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! HOW WE TRIED TO STOP THE WAR

Moratorium1

This morning I attended a briefing by NYT Political Reporter Matt Bai; he was speaking on his new book The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics. It’s a thoughtful, exciting look at American politics – very original. Although if you’ve read his stuff you know that’s no surprise.

I was taking notes, so I headed the page with the date – and was stunned.  It was a memorable day, at least for me.

Remember the Vietnam War?  Or at least all the stories you’ve been told about it?  Today, October 15th, is the 38th anniversary of one of the major demonstrations against that war — after the chaos of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon: the Vietnam Moratorium.

Described as the largest demonstration in US  history, it was quite a day. Astonishingly, Richard Nixon went to the Lincoln Memorial  — in secret, in the middle of the night — to talk to the demonstrators camping out on the grounds there.  Not astonishingly, hundreds were tear-gassed and rounded up — many on the way to class at George Washington University,  and some, like my now-husband, on the way from his office to lunch.

This website from SMU quotes Steven Ambrose:

“Tens of thousands of protesters marched around the White House on October 15th; across the country, in every major city, tens of  thousands attended antiwar rallies. It was, by far, the largest antiwar  protest in  US history.  Altogether, millions were involved. There was little or no violence. Most disturbing to Nixon and his supporters,  the Moratorium brought out the middle class and
the middle-aged in in very large numbers”.

Yeah the middle class was there – and people even older than I am now.  It made a lot of noise and got a remarkable amount of attention.  Jerry Rubin and
Abbie  Hoffman showed up, on bail from the Chicago Seven trial, and pulled
off wigs to show that their hair had been shorn, like Sampson, by their Chicago jailers.

Of course the war didn’t end.  Years later an alleged Soviet spy told an interviewer that the demonstrations had been a dead give-away to the Russians that the US could not sustain the effort.  Who knows?  It was just one more huge event in many efforts to make the war go away.

I have just read that one of the leaders of SDS and one of my favorite thinkers, Todd Gitlin, in his new book, has urged today’s activists to learn from what went wrong then.  They’d better.  For all we tried to do, we never got where we wanted to go and we left a legacy of polarization that still provides fodder for opponents in the culture wars.  It was a noble effort and probably helped demonstrate anti-war sentiment but now, in these times, we need a new way to do that.  It’s intriguing that two highly-regarded thinkers like Bai and Gitlin are both looking at the future of Progressives at the same time — just a year before the next presidential election.

What do you think?  What should we have learned from the battles of the 60s — and of the early years of this century?  What do we still have left to find out?