Nation: At War with War

(3 of 10)

The singular odyssey went on. Nixon and his small contingent wandered through the capital, then drove to the Mayflower Hotel for a breakfast of corned beef hash and eggs—his first restaurant meal in Washington since he assumed power. Then he withdrew to his study in the Executive Office Building to sit out the day of protest.

Considering the potential for disorder, the assembly could have been a disaster. Instead, the main rally was something of a letdown. So much passion had been expended during the preceding week, so much of the verbiage was repetitive, so much of the canned rally routine was familiar, that boredom and the hot sun (90° by midafternoon) were able to distract from the main business at hand. Some of the less inhibited youngsters stripped and went wading in the nearby Reflecting Pool.

Coretta King, David Bellinger, Benjamin Spock and other matriarchs and patriarchs of the movement were there, along with newer personalities like Jane Fonda. Their audience was made up primarily of the instant army of the young, the mobile children who received basic protest training in the late '60s, who can travel light and fast for the peace movement and for their own enjoyment. Some 100,000 of them were there on the Ellipse just south of the White House.

The day was peaceful for the most part. The inevitable sprinkling of troublemakers managed to create some problems for the police, but the more than 6,000 regular troops and militiamen who were being held in readiness had little to do.

One of the few touches of originality was the display of the Yippie flag (marijuana leaves against a red star on a black background). If the rally had a somewhat stale quality, it was not without significance. Despite the frustrations of the peace movement, its troops are still willing to turn out, to follow the script, to attempt to wear down its adversaries. Certainly the Administration took the event seriously. Government staffers went among the crowd chatting with youngsters, inviting some of them back to their offices to meet their superiors. Even Attorney General John Mitchell, with his distaste for dissenters, entertained a group of demonstrators. Later the Justice Department was the target of a paint-throwing attack.

Washington was only the temporary focus of an uprising that touched every part of the U.S., from Bowdoin College in Maine to the University of Miami, from the now familiar volatility of such campuses as Harvard and Berkeley, to more conservative enclaves. At the University of Nebraska in the heart of "Nixon country," students occupied the ROTC headquarters. The University of Arizona, like many other U.S. campuses, had its first taste ever of student activism. Manhattan's Finch College, Tricia Nixon's alma mater, went on strike. At California's Whittier College, 30% of the student body angrily protested the policies of Richard Nixon, its most famous graduate. At the Duke University Law School, Alumnus Nixon's portrait was removed from the wall of the moot courtroom and stored away.

Dado Contrast