Give Peace Activism a Chance

Abstract

On November 15, 1969, a half-million people gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand an end to the Vietnam War. This Mobilization was, at the time, the largest demonstration in American history.' Earlier in the fall, President Richard Nixon had insisted that antiwar protest would change nothing. no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it (p. 352). only college students he would acknowledge during the November Mobe were the ones playing football on the tube. His indifference was just pretense. In fact, the White House was in a state of emergency. Outside, a solid ring of buses, parked bumper-to-bumper, barricaded the Executive Mansion. Underneath and overhead, dozens of National Guardsmen and army troops filled the tunnels and catwalks. From his command post in the White House bomb shelter, Field Marshall John Ehrlichman was in direct communication with police, FBI agents, and intelligence officers throughout the city. And, as always, Nixon wanted a steady stream of dispatches from the antiwar front.2 White House preoccupation with the antiwar movement is amply documented in War Within, Tom Wells's fascinating, well-researched, though somewhat bloated, chronicle of the antiwar movement. Under Johnson and Nixon alike, that preoccupation frequently became obsessive and paranoid. The communists are taking over the country, Johnson ranted in 1967 (p. 205), and Nixon once demanded that a single picketer be removed from Lafayette Park because he was annoyed by the protester's sign. Both administrations concocted hundreds of plans, not always executed, to attack, spy on, infiltrate, sabotage, harass, imprison, smear, divide, counteract, provoke, and placate the antiwar movement. According to Wells, the movement was large and broad-based, dedicated and bold, mostly nonviolent, ideologically diverse, and fully indigenous. From the outset, however, the government belittled its size, denied its political and moral seriousness, exaggerated its violence, and attributed its very existence to cowards, crazies, and commies. government's counteroffensive involved methods that ranged from the