The War: Voice from the Silent Center

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On the left, the antiwar demonstrators matched Rickenbacker in intemperateness—and far surpassed him in volume. The Washington marchers decamped, leaving the Pentagon mall in Augean disarray (see following story). At Baltimore's Selective Service office, a Roman Catholic priest and two laymen poured two pints of blood over 16 file drawers of records while a Protestant minister stood lookout; all four were arrested for their sanguinary ecumenicity and charged with mutilating public records. Protests took place on a score of college campuses.

In Ohio, Oberlin College students trapped a Navy recruiter in his auto for four hours and later staged a protest outside his office; one student who wanted to get inside for an interview had to vault over the sit-ins. Recruiters for Dow Chemical, a manufacturer of napalm, had trouble at several campuses, from Harvard to Minnesota (see EDUCATION). For the protesters, napalm has become the paramount symbol of the war's horror, as evidenced in a grisly three-dimensional assemblage by Red Grooms called Patriots' Parade No. 2. On show last week at Manhattan's New School Art Center, it pictured President Johnson flanked by Miss Napalm and other symbols of death.

Jn the Senate, disquiet over the war took a more reasonable form. Tennessee Democrat Albert Gore called on the President to "honorably extricate" the U.S. from the Vietnamese "quagmire" by agreeing to neutralize Viet Nam. Minnesota Democrat Eugene McCarthy urged Secretary of State Dean Rusk to resign and implied that if he did not, the Democratic Party should dump Lyndon Johnson as its candidate. In a "sense of the Senate" resolution, 56 Senators urged the President to take the Viet Nam issue to the United Nations Security Council—though the U.N. has shown absolutely no interest in handling it.

Armageddon by Installments. Particularly disturbing to the Administration was the effect the protests might have on Hanoi—which last week hailed them as "valuable support" and "a great encouragement." As Lieut. General Lewis Walt, former Marine commander in Viet Nam, told an Oakland, Calif., audience: "In June, I was an optimist. Now I am concerned that we will win the war out there and lose it here at home."

Once again, top officials fanned out to defend Johnson's policies. Rusk was in Los Angeles, where picketers toted signs with such atrociously tasteless slogans as RUSK KILLS CHILDREN FOR PROFIT and RUSK—L.B.J.'S SECRETARY OF HATE. To withdraw from Viet Nam without a "just and peaceful settlement," said Vice President Humphrey in Washington, would be to defer "today's manageable troubles until they become unmanageable—a policy of Armageddon on the installment plan."

Twice during the week, the President mounted rostrums to defend his stand. At the Shoreham Hotel he told the International Federation of Commercial, Clerical and Technical Employees: "In every way we can, we search for peace in Viet Nam. But we appear to be searching alone. Those who began the war are not willing to explore ways to end it. They cling stubbornly to the belief that their aggression will be rewarded—by our frustration, our impatience, our unwillingness to stay the course. It will not be so."