{"id":1640,"date":"2007-10-15T15:33:45","date_gmt":"2007-10-15T15:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/15\/one-two-three-f\/"},"modified":"2016-05-05T11:25:09","modified_gmt":"2016-05-05T18:25:09","slug":"one-two-three-f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/15\/one-two-three-f\/","title":{"rendered":"ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! HOW WE TRIED TO STOP THE WAR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Moratorium1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This morning I attended a briefing by NYT Political Reporter Matt Bai; he was speaking on his\u00a0new book<\/a> 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.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

I was taking notes, so I headed the page with the date – and was stunned.\u00a0 It was a memorable day,\u00a0at least for me.<\/p>\n

Remember the Vietnam War?\u00a0 Or at least all the stories you’ve been told about it?\u00a0 Today, October 15th, is the 38th\u00a0anniversary of one of the major demonstrations against that war — after the\u00a0chaos of 1968 and the election of Richard Nixon: the Vietnam\u00a0Moratorium<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Described as the largest demonstration in US\u00a0 history, it was quite a day. Astonishingly, Richard Nixon went to the\u00a0Lincoln Memorial\u00a0 — in secret, in the middle of the night — to talk to\u00a0the demonstrators camping out on the grounds there.\u00a0 Not astonishingly,\u00a0hundreds were tear-gassed and rounded up — many on the way to class at George Washington University,\u00a0 and some, like\u00a0my now-husband, on the way from his office to lunch.<\/p>\n

This website<\/a> from\u00a0SMU quotes Steven\u00a0Ambrose<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“Tens of thousands of\u00a0protesters marched around the White House on October 15th; across the country,\u00a0in every major city, tens of\u00a0 thousands attended antiwar rallies. It was,\u00a0by far, the largest antiwar\u00a0 protest in\u00a0 US history. \u00a0Altogether,\u00a0millions were involved. There was little or no violence. Most disturbing to\u00a0Nixon and his supporters,\u00a0 the Moratorium brought out the middle class and
\nthe middle-aged in in very large numbers”.<\/em><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah the middle class was there – and people even older than I am now.\u00a0 It made a lot of noise and got a remarkable amount of attention.\u00a0 Jerry Rubin <\/a>and
\nAbbie\u00a0 Hoffman<\/a> showed up, on bail from the Chicago Seven trial<\/a>, and pulled
\noff wigs to show that their hair had been shorn, like Sampson, by their Chicago jailers.<\/p>\n

Of course the\u00a0war didn’t end.\u00a0 Years later an alleged Soviet spy told an interviewer\u00a0that the demonstrations had been a dead give-away to the Russians that the US could not sustain the effort.\u00a0 Who knows?\u00a0 It was just one more huge event in\u00a0many efforts to make the war go away.<\/p>\n

I have just read that one of the leaders of SDS<\/a> and one of my\u00a0favorite thinkers, Todd Gitlin,<\/a> in his new book<\/a>, has urged today’s activists to\u00a0learn from what went wrong then.\u00a0 They’d better.\u00a0 For all we tried to\u00a0do, we never got where we wanted to go and we left a legacy of polarization\u00a0that still provides fodder for opponents in the culture wars.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

What do you think?\u00a0 What should we have learned from the battles of the 60s — and of the early years of this century?\u00a0 What do we still have left to find out?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I attended a briefing by NYT Political Reporter Matt Bai; he was speaking on his\u00a0new 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, … Continue reading ONE! TWO! THREE! FOUR! HOW WE TRIED TO STOP THE WAR<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,4,6,27,7,9],"tags":[18,288,1225,2056,381,593,1585,2070,2068,2069,359,385],"class_list":["post-1640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2","category-baby-boom","category-culture","category-current-affairs","category-life","category-politics","tag-activism","tag-culture-wars","tag-democrats","tag-matt-bai","tag-moratorium","tag-progressives","tag-richard-nixon","tag-sds","tag-steven-ambrose","tag-todd-gitlin","tag-vietnam","tag-vietnam-war"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-qs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1640"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4364,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1640\/revisions\/4364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}