The Chess of Ending a War

Monday, May. 10, 1971

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THE script seemed once more to be playing out with the inevitability of Greek theater. Again a chorus of dissenters in the Washington spring, again the President before reporters and television cameras, explaining, in the tenth year of the Viet Nam War, that he could not be moved by demonstrators' passions. Both sides, as always, clung to their own higher logic—the protesters to the rights of humanity beyond all political or even practical considerations, the President to his responsibilities to a larger design for peace ("Not just for us, but for our children, their children"). But for all the ritual quality of both the demonstrations and Richard Nixon's pronouncements, they contained new and unique elements.

Large questions about the future of the antiwar movement would be answered this week as the Mayday demonstrators, numbering up to 30,000, attempt an exercise in "nonviolent civil disobedience" to shut down the Federal Government for two days by blocking nine key bridges and intersections in Washington during rush hours.

Guerrilla Theater. The problems of keeping such disruptive protest peaceful may be difficult for both demonstrators and police. All last week a force of about 2,000 youths and adults, organized loosely around the People's Lobby, experimented throughout Washington with blunt, symbolic techniques of agitation. Groups raced through the corridors of the Capitol and Senate Office Building, wailing and moaning for the Vietnamese civilian dead. Some stormed into congressional offices to perform guerrilla theater, miming war's atrocities. In Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater's office, demonstrators dumped red paint onto books and furniture, including an Indian art object. Goldwater responded by simply closing his office for the duration.

Protesters shrieked from the Senate gallery: "People are dying! God have mercy on your souls!" Some, led by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's Hosea Williams, stormed the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Others gathered at the "war machine's" Justice Department and Selective Service offices, lobbying with civil service workers, sometimes trying to bar the doors. By night, much of the group camped in tents in West Potomac Park near the Jefferson Memorial, where drugs and petty thefts contaminated the larger purpose of the gathering.

Bumper Sticker. Last week's performance left a sour and uneasy feeling among many Congressmen and others who had been profoundly moved by the previous week's protests by dissident Viet Nam veterans. "The vets left a really strong and favorable impression," said an aide to one of the Senate's most outspoken doves. "But these kids are destroying it." One group that appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reduced Vermont Senator George Aiken, a persistent war critic, to sounding like a right-wing bumper sticker. Advising them that there was no law against leaving the U.S., he snapped: "Why the hell do you stay here if other countries are so much better?"