Today is the 40th anniversary of the start of the May Day demonstrations against the Vietnam War here in Washington, D.C. The event began on the first of May 1971 with a rock concert and then got down to business on Monday with a week-long effort to close down bridges and streets in D.C., to “bring the war home.” I was part of that week-long event but not as a protester; I was high school senior indulging my dream of becoming a reporter. I now work in D.C. as assistant editor of a D.C.-based magazine with world-wide circulation. Forty years ago, I was just another 18 year old who dreamed about getting out of his hometown but who was still such a straight-arrow that, though I had shoulder-length hair, I didn’t pitch my idea of covering the protest to my local underground paper – I went to the editor of my home-town daily newspaper. I offered to write about the cadre of local university students and what the week was like for them. I got a gruff “We’ll see if it’s any good, and if it is maybe we’ll use it.” That was enough for me. A high school friend and his girlfriend came along, as much as anything to spend the week away from their parents, and we headed east 700 miles to the District in my little Toyota. As soon as we arrived, we parted company with a plan to reunite at the week’s end for our return. Solo in the capital, with a press credential issued by the demonstration’s organizer, the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, I got in touch with the students from my local college and asked if I could tag along. The demonstration began with a rock concert headlined by the essence of mellow California, the Beach Boys. The next day, Monday, began a hectic week in which I and the college students I hung out with were chased by cops riding little motor scooters and sat-in along with hundreds of others in the street before the Justice Department Building. But I could always get out of any jam by waving my press credentials, and (to be truly frank) I was even at a remove from the protest itself: I was always interviewing or “absorbing the scene.” The worst I got was a sharp poke in the belly from the end of a nightstick. I spent each evening typing up my notes and then falling asleep where I worked ‑ in the back seat of my tiny car. I’d parked the car in front of severe-looking structure sprouting numerous antennas and located just off Embassy Row. One morning, a big man in an ill-fitting suit came out and approached my car to ask that I park elsewhere. While his people endorsed the peace-loving motives of the demonstrator-comrades, he said, I had chosen to park at the Washington office of the Soviet Union’s security service.While in D.C., I met with the two middle-aged guys who ran the D.C. bureau for the chain that owned our local paper. We talked of their work, covering farm bills in Congress and such, and without knowing it I got a peek at reporter burnout; it was like meeting my ink-stained Marley’s Ghost. Try as I might, I could not persuade them to send my story back on their Teletype, and so mailed it. I could have hand-delivered it; the story arrived too old to print. And, if that hadn’t killed the story, my predilection for purple prose would have. I remember nothing about the article except its ending, which said the students were “returning to their campuses and to other wars.” For such awful writing, I should’ve been jailed.Actually, it was the demonstrators – by the thousands ‑ who were jailed; the largest mass arrest in U.S. history. Most were never arraigned. They were swept up and loaded onto buses and taken to huge internment camps, such as that at the Washington Armory, and held for the rest of the week until efforts to shut down the city ended. Years later, many received payments from the federal government as compensation for its having violated their right to due process. At the time, though, it must have seemed that the hyperbole they’d heard about the “fascist Nixon administration” was being proved true.And so on this anniversary of the attempt to close down D.C., I want to say my thanks to the demonstrators, people largely a bit older than me who took a risk of being beaten, going to jail and maybe having an FBI file started on them. No one can say how the demonstrations affected the ending of the war – it went on for another three years ‑ but they involved people who cared enough to try to keep the war in the public’s eye. Sadly, the anniversary of the demonstrations seems largely forgotten. Look for the New Mobilization, or “New Mobe,” on Wikipedia and you’ll find nothing but an invitation to write the first entry. Yesterday, a column in the Washington Post on May Day mentioned presidents and May poles but nothing about the New Mobe demonstration, arguably the most significant news event associated with the holiday.
As for myself, I’ve come to find that D.C. traffic is always bad, not just during demonstrations. But I’ve also since had the opportunity to join an anti-war demonstration – that against the first war with Iraq ‑ and I’m proud to say I wasn’t there as a reporter.
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Kathy Knechtges
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
The more things change, the more they stay the same. So much has changed. But then, has it?
I wonder if the Soviet Union started a file on you!
And you went to a demonstration again.
Amazing isn't it? Those two were to good to fight but they were fine with their own draft dodging ways and no one seemed to even care that they did it. They also denigrated John Murtha, since he would not toe the company line I suppose. The point is that if we do not do it ourselves then who will? If we do not get our children and grand children to stop seeing murder death and poverty as something other people have to worry about then we have lost it all.
To Maoist, below, I want to mention that the street where I parked/spent my nights is just off Mass. Ave. from the Washington Islamic Center -- which I really recommend everyone visit. My wife and I did a few years back and were welcomed and felt this mosque was a place of great serenity. It's kind of ironic that I was spending my nights parked between the headquarters of a Cold War bastion while but, just across a small park, lay a symbol of America's challenge for the future, its relationship with the Islamic world.