Jeremy Varon (22 page)

Discerning the reality behind activists’ warring rhetoric sheds light on the important question—one central to any judgment on Weatherman—

of what role militancy and violence played in the successes and failures of the antiwar movement.

In addition, mass demonstrations elicited from their participants, observers, and critics alike a vocabulary of “the people,” “the masses,”

“hearts and minds,” and “the majority.” These were the key terms with which the war’s supporters and opponents sought to justify their positions. In the fall of 1969, each side claimed that it was the majority—that it had won Americans’ hearts and minds. This rhetorical standoff represented more than the predictably contrasting claims of opposing political interests or the challenge of accurately measuring public opinion.

Rather, it reflected the instability of the entire vocabulary of democratic legitimation with which political opponents laid claim to a popular mandate. That instability was rooted, in part, in the inherent difficulty of giving voice to such amorphous entities as “the people” or “the masses.”

Whatever the faith commonly placed in them, these groupings can only be represented symbolically, making the domestic battle over Vietnam a war of symbolisms, in which each side developed an arsenal of images, words, and actions by which it asserted itself as the bearer of the public’s will. More deeply, the volatile nature of the debate on the war raised the possibility that the very notions of “the people,” “the masses,” and “the majority” are inventions of language. The persistent ambiguity regarding just what Americans thought about the Vietnam War signals an indeter-minacy at democracy’s core. The bitter conflict over the war—a seemingly exceptional domestic struggle born of exceptional circumstances—

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thus exposes the fragility of democratic assumptions under “normal” political conditions.

Ambiguities in democratic theory and practice powerfully affected the efforts of radicals to articulate a rationale for “bringing the war home.”

Their efforts yielded competing visions of resistance, divided chiefly over whether antiwar activists felt they were fighting on behalf of or against the American people. This tension tapped into a broader crisis in the political imagination of the left, for which appeals to “the people” and “the masses” have held a special place.

.

.

.

Then they’ll raise their hands,

Sayin’ we’ll meet all your demands,

But we’ll shout from the bow your days

are numbered.

And like Pharaoh’s tribe,

They’ll be drownded in the tide,

And like Goliath, they’ll be conquered

Bob Dylan, “When the Ship Comes In”

On October 15, 1969, more than two million people participated in local and regional antiwar demonstrations known collectively as “the Moratorium.” The demonstrations were organized by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC), which had formed in the early summer for the purpose of staging the protests. Hatched by two former youth organizers for the antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy, the idea of the Moratorium was to show that antiwar sentiment had spread far beyond major cities and campuses and was now everywhere in America. All manner of campus groups and civic, religious, and professional associations joined in the organizing, giving the Moratorium an aura of

“respectability” and the reputation among some radicals of being a “liberal” protest.1

The hard organizing work of the summer and early fall paid off beyond anyone’s expectations. The Moratorium events were impressive for their grassroots focus, size, scope, and involvement of politicians and celebrities. Coretta Scott King, the widow of the recently slain Martin Luther King Jr., led candle bearers encircling the White House. Tens of thousands gathered in New York City to hear speeches by Shirley 116

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MacLaine, Woody Allen, and Senator McCarthy. Organizers in New Haven called everyone in the phone book, producing a demonstration of 30,000 people. Detroit’s mayor called on Nixon to “commence immediately the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam.” Liberal congresspersons engaged the House of Representatives in hours of debate about the war, and thousands of federal employees joined in the day’s protests. High school students throughout the country boycotted classes.

Two New Jersey teenagers even took their own lives on the evening of the Moratorium, apparently in anguished protest of the war.2 The Moratorium was an “outpouring of public dissent unprecedented in American history.”3 In its peacefulness and mainstream cast, it was also the first major antiwar protest with which the mainstream press sympathized.

The Moratorium, immensely successful in showing the breadth of antiwar sentiment, served as a rehearsal for mass rallies in Washington and San Francisco exactly one month later. The November demonstrations were organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (New Mobe), a coalition of prominent antiwar groups that had for several years organized protests under the name “the Mobe.” In its composition and reputation, the New Mobe was more radical than the VMC; young militants, radical pacifists, and various left-wing groups gravitated to the November demonstrations as the occasion for their voices to be more forcefully heard. VMC leaders endorsed the New Mobe protest with great hesitation, as they feared that violence in Washington would undermine the statement made by the Moratorium.

Though the New Mobe repeatedly announced its peaceful intentions, the issue of violence hovered over the November protest in a double sense.

On the one hand, the Nixon administration sought to portray the event as far more threatening than the October Moratorium, despite the fact that many activists drew no sharp distinction between the two protests and attended both. The administration’s claim was that the November demonstration would attract violence-prone elements with an anti-American agenda. Vice President Spiro Agnew, as part of a coordinated campaign to smear the demonstration, denounced the “anarchists and Communists” in the New Mobe leadership for preying “upon the intentions of gullible men” and turning their “honest concern” into something

“sick and rancid.” In a televised address on November 3, Nixon announced the support of America’s “silent majority” for the war and proclaimed that the “vocal minority” of demonstrators threatened the country’s “future as a free society.” In response to loudly advertised fears of

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violence, 9,000 troops were brought to Washington and Marines set up machine guns on the Capitol steps.4

On the other hand, some antiwar forces were indeed hoping for militant action in Washington. The Yippie leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin called for a demonstration on the evening of November 15 at the Justice Department to protest the ongoing Chicago 8 conspiracy trial, in which they were defendants. Though Hoffman publicly pledged that the action would be nonviolent, Rubin privately told one alarmed organizer that the plan was to attack the building.5 A rally on the evening of November 14 at Dupont Circle also provided a likely occasion for violence.

The rally was sponsored by the “Revolutionary Contingent in Solidarity with the Vietnamese People,” which included the Weathermen, militant New York activists calling themselves “the Crazies,” and independent SDS chapters. Weatherman had at one point envisioned a prominent role for itself in the November demonstrations. The plan was to hold small, regional demonstrations on November 8 and then lead droves of youth in a violent rampage in Washington, much like in the Days of Rage. Politically isolated and burdened by legal and financial difficulties, Weatherman scaled back its ambitions. Though the group insisted that the war would be ended by military defeat and not by demonstrations, Ayers conceded at a press conference in Chicago shortly before the protest that “any motion against the war in Vietnam is significant at this point. Anything that stops the killing of Vietnamese people . . . we’re supporting; so we’re going to Washington, D.C.” Weatherman also announced that it would leave its helmets at home and refrain from violence.6 Yet some remained suspicious of Weatherman’s true intentions.

The FBI, aided by wiretaps and informants, tracked the Weathermen’s push toward Washington. The New Mobe, for its part, would deploy thousands of marshals to keep order and deter violence throughout the weekend.7

On November 11, a final, ominous sign came when a collective headed by Sam Melville bombed the offices of Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, and General Motors in New York City. One day later, it bombed the Criminal Courts Building. The collective had made headlines over the summer and early fall for bombings in New York of a Marine Midland Bank, the Federal Building, and the Whitehall Street Military Induction Center. The explosions did hundreds of thousands of dollars’

worth of damage, temporarily disabled the Whitehall center, and caused New York radicals to speculate about who had so boldly turned talk of 118

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revolutionary violence into action. The group also attracted the interest of the FBI, which set up a twenty-person unit to investigate the bombings.8 The November bombings would be the collective’s last. On the evening of November 12, Melville was apprehended by nearly two dozen armed agents while attempting to bomb military trucks in the company of a police informant. Authorities quickly arrested two co-conspirators, Jane Alpert and David Hughey, and issued a warrant on a third, Patricia Swinton, but missed the involvement of Robin Palmer and three others (among them an Ivy League professor) whose identities were never publicly revealed. Melville was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. He would later be killed in the 1971 Attica prison uprising, making him one of the New Left’s few and most beloved martyrs.

After Weatherman, the New York City collective was at the time the most significant New Left group engaged in violence. Its activities testify to the growing volatility of the antiwar movement as the war ground on and the tension between violence and nonviolence sharpened. Capturing this unsettled climate, on November 12, the front page of the
Washington Post
featured a story about the issuing of a permit for the peaceful New Mobe march two days later alongside a report on the collective’s latest strike, headlined “3 Bombings in N.Y. Tied to War Foes.” The collective also affirms what focus on the Weathermen can obscure, namely, that the Weathermen were neither alone among New Leftists in pursuing armed struggle nor represented the only way of doing things.

Sam Melville defined the spirit of the collective, even if he was a unique personality within it. Born Sam Grossman, the son of a Jewish communist, from whom he had become estranged, he changed his name to Melville because of his love of Herman Melville’s novel
Moby Dick,
rife with the themes of adventure and lonely obsession. Friends describe him as the quintessential man of action: handsome, charismatic, and ema-nating an enticing sense of danger, he seemed something of an American archetype. (His girlfriend and fellow bomber, Jane Alpert, said of him:

“Radical politics, an air of masculine authority, and a delicious illicit sense about sex—Sam mesmerized me.”)9 Unlike the Weathermen or other members of his collective, Melville had no need of complex justifications for violence and elaborate training to sharpen his courage. Instead, he gravitated, as if by instinct, to violence as an expression of political principle or simple common sense. He bitterly complained, for instance, that protestors remained too passive when under attack by police at street demonstrations.10 Political friends, alluding to both his name and character, called him Ahab. Explaining the moniker, Palmer confessed that

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though Melville was quite smart, he was at root “an anti-intellectual

[who] much preferred doing something to giving a speech about it. . . .

Sam didn’t like to talk, he liked to act. He was Ahabian.”11 Melville, in short, appeared to embody Weatherman’s ideal of militancy that exalted decisiveness and disparaged mere rhetoric.

The New York collective did not, however, share Weatherman’s rigid ideology, seemingly single-minded commitment to revolutionary violence, or tight group discipline. Its members remained active in their careers and in a range of activism, including alternative education, underground journalism, and guerrilla theater. They neither adopted the toughened personas of “stone-cold revolutionaries,” as the Weathermen had done, nor kept a low profile, as caution would seem to dictate. Two members, Palmer and a female friend, were in fact famous in Greenwich Village’s radical scene for their Yippie antics. On Halloween night of 1968, the two had run naked through a high-profile gathering in New York City of recently declared Humphrey Democrats and then presented the severed head of a pig to John Kenneth Galbraith, while supporters brandished Viet Cong flags and chanted revolutionary slogans. They continued these spirited disruptions, which often entailed arrest, well into their careers as bombers.

Being so conspicuous as theatrical troublemakers, they figured, would discourage police from thinking they could conceivably be involved in bombings. For added measure, they strictly separated their activities in New York’s West Village, where much of the guerrilla theatre was planned, from those in the East Village, where the dynamite was stored and the bombings planned.

The life of the Melville collective, unlike that of the hyperdisciplined Weathermen, had a haphazard, make-it-up-as-you-go-along quality, punctuated by moments of exhilaration and great danger. The impulse to commit bombings came partly from two Canadian “Quebec Liberation Front” fugitives, whom Melville and Alpert had harbored in New York and then helped in hijacking a plane to Cuba. The Canadians, impressing their American hosts with their intelligence and commitment, made the guerrilla life seem appealing. The New York group secured its dynamite when three members robbed a Bronx explosives company.

Elated, they kept the dynamite for weeks in a kitchen refrigerator (having heard that it stayed “fresh” that way), while they debated what to do with it. The first strike proved inauspicious. On July 26, 1969, the anniversary of an important date in the Cuban revolution, Melville bombed a warehouse of the United Fruit Company, which had backed the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. The bomb, however, was placed 120