'Demonstrations Will Never Be The Same; We've Turned The Pentagon Upside Down'

"There are those who would always rather be Red than dead, who do not mind seeing small nations gobbled up. They would almost rather be anything but responsible. What do they know, these bearded oafs who listen to the strumming of lugubrious guitars? To be loved is not the end of greatness."--Dr. George R. Davis, in a sermon Oct. 22 at a church service attended by President Johnson.

Under Siege

As night fell Saturday, the Pentagon looked like a citadel under siege. A yellow fog of smoke and tear gas hung stagnant over the grounds. Soldiers marching in front of the main entrance threw huge, ugly shadows on the thick concrete walls. Across the parking lot reserved for top military brass, down the steps, and sloping out over the rolling wall, demonstrators spilled. Some of them were warming themselves in front of bonfires made with ripped-up placards and sticks. A long line of buses with their headlamps glowing strung-out along the access roads. The air was chilly but still evening-calm, and a heavy yellow moon hung over the whole scene.

The day had begun on the Washington side of the river. Tens of thousands of people clung to the sides of the Reflecting Pool, which stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. They overflowed beyond the big shade trees and sat on the banks on the Constitution Avenue side. David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was standing in front of a rostrum across the street from the scolding stare of Abraham Lincoln. Dellinger was saying, "Our-voices will be heard and our bodies will be heeded."

Each speaker who followed Dellinger was trying to out-epithet the others. Norman Mailer '43 had called Lyndon Johnson "an imbecile" the day before. Now John Wilson of SNCC was calling Lyndon Johnson a "criminal" and "a fool." And Dr. Benjamin Spock chipped in: "The enemy, we believe in all sincerity, is Lyndon Johnson."

As the speeches droned on for two hours, as Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary (remember?) soured a few songs, as the crowd became more and more restless, a strange thing happened. It was becoming evident that here around the Reflecting Pool people were celebrating the last sacrament of an irrelevant form of protest. The crowd was itching to get going, to bury the numbers game once and for all, to do something hard and steely and significant this time.

The Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara, The New York Times Magazine reports, "relaxes well, is a provocative conversationalist because of his wide interests and has the grace and erudition to enterain the lady next to him at the dinner table with a recitation of Yeats."

Fifty thousand demonstrators (if I may estimate) walked slowly, stop-and-go, across Memorial Bridge, up the road toward John F. Kennedy's grave in Arlington Cemetery, then turned left and marched down Boundary Channel Drive past scores of little white yachts tied up in Boundary Channel.

And there they were, right in front of the 24-year-old fortress with three times the floor space of the Empire State Building where the Defense Department lives and where the sportcoated Secretary of Defense was watching them out of his window.

Nazis

Violence had begun at the Reflecting Pool. Two young men in wind-breaker jackets relieved the boredom by rushing British Labor leader Clive Jenkins, who was speaking, and smashing him and the rostrum and all the microphones down to the ground. No one was hurt, and the two men, later identified as members of the American Nazi Party (Arlington, Va.), were wrestled away by marshals as the Nazis yelled, "Commies, commies, Vietcong commies," into a microphone obligingly held by a radio station technician.

The Nazis were in front of the entrance to the Pentagon, too, at least until a whole horde of demonstrators, sick of their taunts, set upon ten of them and chased them over roads and fences and parking lots, beating them over the head with the Nazis' own picket signs.

MP (to reporter): "Where's your press pass?"

Reporter (pointing to lapel): "Right here."

MP (quite angry at seeing a small paper flower just above the badge): "Take off that damn flower."

With a huge rush, 1000 demonstrators streaked across the North Parking Lot, where speeches were still going on. With three Vietcong flags in the lead, they raced up to a line of 20 soldiers and U.S. marshals and stopped. Then they strung themselves out over 300 yards, standing there jaw-to-jaw with the troops.

It was like capture-the-flag. In small groups, the demonstrators rushed out across the line. Soldiers stopped them. The demonstrators went limp, and marshals dragged them off to paddy wagons around the corner.

"Cowaaaaards!"

There was a lot of frustration. One pretty blonde girl, who identified herself as Gretchen Begen of New York City, ran over the line yelling, "Come on, come on," to the crowd. But nobody came. She flopped down in the grass and marshals carted her away on a stretcher. Another girl, with magnificent eyes ringed in green and black paint and wearing an Indiana sweatshirt, got carted away, too. She was mad at the people she left behind sitting in the grass. She sat up in her stretcher and screamed, "Cowaaards!" When we asked for her name she just glared at us. We felt useless.

Under a bush, at the feet of a rifle-toting MP's, a cluster of ten young people were puffing marijuana. They were grinning. Nearby, a woman with stringy black hair was reading poetry aloud and eating a thickly-buttered bagel.

The Washington Post reported Monday: "Three antiwar demonstrators were arrested for picking flowers in Lafayette Park [across from the White House] and several others were injured in an ensuing foray with police at dawn yesterday...[Police] said more than a dozen flowers had been plucked and then tossed to the ground. Picking flowers is a violaiton of Park Service regulations."

Meanwhile, at the main entrance, 500 demonstrators flew at the huge doors. Some got inside the Pentagon and were immediately arrested. MP's and marshals responded toughly. Demonstrators were hauled up and tossed away. Scores were arrested.

At another entrance Dr. Spock, Dellinger, writer Dwight Macdonald, M.I.T.'s Noam Chomsky, poet Robert Lowell '37, Mrs. Dagmar Wilson of Women's Strike for Peace, comedian Dick Gregory and about 20 other notables were being hemmed in by soldiers as they sat arguing about the war in a one-sided conversation with the troops. The troops kicked and shoved them, and they were scared. Finally, after holding Spock and friends captive for over an hour, the soldiers moved back. Dellinger and several others were arrested.

Around dinnertime, the tear gas went off. A Pentagon spokesman went on television to deny that the soldiers had fired it. He suggested the demonstrators set off the grenades themselves. But scores of eyewitnesses, many of them newsmen, have said that they saw the troops fire the tear gas. Who had the gas masks anyway?

Screaming Babies

And behind the beetle-faced canvas and plastic masks, paratroopers, it is rumored, cried when they saw women carrying off screaming babies, 15-year-old boys vomiting on the side of the road, and girls clutching scarves to their faces so they wouldn't gag on the sandy air.

Two young women, who had bought $100 box seats to a U.N. Concert at Constitution Hall, were denied admission by federal agents Saturday night, The Washington Post reported. The reason: they had brought with them an anti-war cartoon--embracing men of many nations--which they wanted cellist Pablo Casals to autograph, one of them said. The problem: their box adjoined that of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. And the dove cartoon was interpreted as a possible threat by Rusk's protectors.

The gas masks formed a phalanx and marched straight down the road at us, rifles slanting ready. It was a terrible feeling, knowing that they were your people, and that maybe with money and an education they could be in your place and that maybe without them you could be in theirs.

One Negro demonstrator was screaming hysterically at a Negro soldier: "How can you do this to us? Don't you realize you're fighting for Wall Street? How can you do it?" The Negro soldier spoke to his sergeant, then was replaced at his station.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, conspicuous by his absence, telegramed Mobilization leaders: "You who are protesting with your bodies...are the creative spirit that will end the war."

Later Saturday night, two soldiers were seen to drop their rifles, take off their ammunition belts and disappear into the crowd. One was later seen being led away by MP guards.

They were, perhaps, repelled by the horrible violence that was going on around them, violence in which they were participating. Rifle butts smashed on girls' heads. One bald man was crunched so hard you could hear his skull crack.

One Harvard student, who described himself as an "apolitical hippie," sat outside the Mall Entrance in the cold night until 6 a.m. Sunday. Late Sunday afternoon, he was speaking in a hoarse crackle, his hands still frozen-pink. He was a changed man politically: "You get there and you see someone get his head split open for nothing. You can't leave. You've got to sit there, to do something. That's when you become committed."

In the fourth paragraph of a long Associated Press dispatch on the weekend's events, it was learned: "The demonstration had the official blessing of the North Vietnamese government."

What was so different about the siege of the Pentagon? Here there was real resistance, a fierce kind of underdog, "guerillish" power kept the demonstrators going. Maybe they found out what it was like to be Vietcong. But more significantly, maybe they found out what it is like to be American in a country of a different kind of American. That is a hard thing. But inside, as one Harvard demonstrator said, "it makes you feel unbelievably clean." Said another: "Demonstrations will never be the same. We've turned the Pentagon upside down. Things will never be the same again." Something was beginning