Jeremy Varon (23 page)

“Hearts and Minds”

near soft dirt, greatly muffling the explosion and earning it only a small mention in the
New York Times.
With neither great forethought nor the group’s clearance, Melville then, in the late evening, bombed a Marine Midland bank. A warning, which Alpert had begged Melville to phone in, was ignored by a night watchman. Nearly twenty people, mostly female secretaries working the night shift, suffered minor injuries, leaving Melville devastated and determined never again to so recklessly endanger people. The group soon grew more efficient. In September, Alpert planted a bomb on the floor of New York’s Federal Building, which housed U.S. military. Describing the process of transporting the bomb, Alpert reports having felt hyperaware of her surroundings, at once fearful and “absolutely happy,” nervous and oddly calm, “as when the first rush of an acid trip subsides.” Watching the massive explosion at 2 a.m.

from a distant building, she and the others stood in silent awe and then erupted in jubilation at having slowed the war machine and, in her mind,

“brought the revolution an inch or two closer.”12

Though ostensibly pledged to communist revolution, the collective framed its rebellion more in existential than in narrowly political terms.

The communiqué accompanying the bombings on November 10, which the
Washington Post
called “highly literate,” read “corporations have made us into useless consumers, devouring increasing quantities of useless credit cards and household appliances. Jobs are mindless. Vast machines pollute our air, water and food.”13 Explaining the deepest roots of his actions, Melville later wrote from prison: “We must move to a place beyond all known issues. . . . What we want is salvation from a meaningless annihilation. To not be cremated for coka-cola and plastic flags . . . on the moon.”14 He also conceded soon after his arrest what Weatherman as an organization would take years to admit: that guerrilla activity in America was scarcely destroying the U.S. power structure or world imperialism. Melville defended his activities, at last, in strongly ethical terms, writing, “In a time when all action seems meaningless at least we won’t be good Germans.”15

Whatever the illicit pleasures of the collective’s improvised rebellion, the group’s lack of discipline would cost it dearly. An aspect of Melville’s imperious personality was his refusal to adhere fully to group decisions.

By early November, the collective had nearly fallen apart, dividing precisely over the question of whether it made political sense to commit bombings so close to the November 15 demonstration. Melville pressed on, winning half the collective back to bombings. Yet over the group’s strenuous objections, he recruited George Demmerle, the informant re-

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sponsible for the collective’s demise. Demmerle, as was standard for provocateurs, had spent months proving his stripes among radicals (he had been arrested for protest activity and tirelessly staffed a Yippie booth at Woodstock); talked loudly and even crazily of the need for violence; and slowly won the trust of his main target, Melville, who was seeking collaborators not prone to second thoughts.16 Despite its doubts, the group did not subject Demmerle to the presumptuous and potentially degrading tests—such as drugging and verbally abusing the “suspect”

to see if he would crack—that Weatherman used to root out informants.

The collective was distinct from Weatherman in a last important way.

While Weatherman was talking boldly of its desire to wage an all-out guerrilla war, the New York collective engaged strictly in what it dubbed

“pacifist bombings.” Attacking property only, and, after the Marine Midland explosion, issuing warnings to prevent injury, it pioneered a style of attack that would only later become Weatherman’s signature.

The recent bombings, along with the Dupont Circle and Justice Department actions planned for November, conveyed the skepticism of antiwar radicals as to what large, peaceful demonstrations could accomplish. For five years, the antiwar movement had had to contend with the sense that activities such as marching, petitioning, and lobbying Congress had little effect on war policy. Wells documents a “broad historical pattern,” evident already by 1967, in which “[p]erceptions of powerlessness were especially prevalent among antiwar activists in the weeks after big national protests.”17 By the end of the 1960s, many activists were tired of the cycle of exhilaration and disappointment associated with large demonstrations. Pointing to the movement’s apparent legacy of failure, some denounced the continued pleas for civility by mainstream antiwar leaders and engaged in such militant actions as burning draft cards, closing down military induction centers, stopping troop trains, “trashing” property at demonstrations, and, at an extreme, bombing military and corporate targets.

Such acts were hardly the exclusive doing of the young. Long before Weatherman formed, older activists pledged to pacifism and driven by religious conviction were committing sabotage against the war machine.

Most notably, in May 1968, in Catonsville, Maryland, nine activists, including two Catholic priests, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, took 1-A files designating young men for service from a Draft Board office and burned them with crude napalm made from a recipe in a U.S. military handbook.

They prayed while waiting for the police, who arrested them on the charge of interfering with the administration of the Selective Service Act.18 At 122

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their trial, they argued that it was their moral duty, given the accumulating horror of the war, the futility of appeals to the powerful, and the nature of their faith, to transcend symbolism and hinder the U.S. military in “an actual physical way.”19 In this they succeeded, as the files had to be laboriously reconstructed. But it was precisely the symbolism that gave the act its greatest power. The napalm did not burn human beings, but only pieces of paper—files that stood “for the death of the men they represent.” To the charge that they were sowing disorder, the defendants answered that they had violated only that “public order which is in effect a massive institutionalized disorder . . . killing is disorder.” Addressing the court and the country, they intoned: “When at what point will you say no to this war? We have chosen to say with the gift of our liberty, if necessary our lives: the violence stops here, the death stops here . . . this war stops here.” They were convicted and given sentences ranging from two to three and a half years in prison.

The deeds of the Catonsville 9, as the group came to be called, gave rise to similar actions. Over the next several years, close-knit groups of faith-based activists—nearly all strict pacifists and a great many devout Catholics—raided Draft Board and other government offices in over a dozen cities. The early model for these actions was to wait for capture and use the resulting trial to challenge the war publicly. As stiff sentences were handed down and the war escalated, the raiders operated more and more clandestinely. Better to mute the symbolism and live free to fight another day, some reasoned, than to spend months or years behind bars, where one’s value to the antiwar cause was not nearly as great.20

These raids, which meant taking on extraordinary levels of risk, were motivated very much by the desire to match deeds to words. In this respect, despite their pacifism, spiritual conditioning, and ethical rigor, the militants of the religious left strangely mirrored the equally small, close-knit cadres of young radicals exploring subversion by violent means.

Their actions also underscore how difficult it became to strictly separate violent and nonviolent protest. The Berrigan circle took as its mandate the premise that “certain property has no right to exist: concentration camps, slums, and 1-A files.”21 To destroy these was therefore not violent at all. Even so, the cumulative, material damage to the war machine caused by pacifists—priests, nuns, and clergy among them—may have rivaled or even exceeded the damage done by New Leftists fancying themselves guerrillas pledged to violent insurrection.

The escalation of tactics reflected not only a heightened sense of urgency but also ideological shifts within the antiwar movement. Toward

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the end of the 1960s, increasing numbers of activists saw Vietnam as an imperialist war. This view opposed more limited understandings of the war as an expression of the stubborn pride of President Johnson and his advisors, perpetuated by his duplicitous successor; an overzealous anticommunism that misinterpreted America’s true security interests; or the deep-seated militarism of American society. Instead, anti-imperialists viewed the war as a logical extension of the American economic and political system—as something that America’s corporate, political, and military leadership both
wanted
and
needed.
The reluctance of the U.S. government to end the war in the face of unrelenting opposition from the National Liberation Front in Vietnam and widespread protest at home compounded the impression that the war was no isolated foreign policy mistake but a structural necessity for American capitalism.

As anti-imperialism gained ground, many protesters also began to express their active support for the NLF. In doing so, they came into conflict with activists whose goal was peace and whose principal objections to the war were its political and financial costs to the United States and the tremendous suffering it caused on both sides. Support for the NLF became conspicuous in the symbolism of radicals. Some displayed, often at considerable risk of censure within the movement or attack by police, NLF flags and chanted at rallies “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” In one incident, a contingent marching in Philadelphia in 1967

provoked the United Veterans for Peace by carrying NLF flags; tensions got so high that police had to separate the flag holders from the other marchers.22 Behind these overt gestures of solidarity with the NLF lay a deeper, more personal sense of identification with the Vietnamese. Some American activists saw the sacrifice of the Vietnamese as the wellspring of their own protest and comparatively modest sacrifice. Palmer, who zealously promoted the use of the NLF flag as the antiwar movement’s most powerful symbol, wrote in 1967, “We protest because the NLF

fights; we march in broad daylight, because the NLF crawls through jungles at night; we get our heads cracked and our knees clubbed because those in the NLF die.” Defending the NLF politically, he added, “the war will end sooner (America will withdraw) when more Americans realize that they are fighting something good they cannot defeat instead of something evil they cannot defeat.”23

Imperialism was also a way of describing the distribution of power in the United States, with important implications for antiwar resistance. The charge of imperialism, with its Marxist premises, suggested that American foreign policy served the interests of a more or less coherent capi-124

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talist class that was only superficially committed to democracy at home.

Radicals were therefore leery of democratic appeals to a power structure intent on fighting the war for its financial and political gain. Within an anti-imperialist framework, resistance to the war translated easily into a desire for the radical redistribution of political and economic power in the United States. In its most ambitious rendering, the call to “bring the war home” meant trying to bring down the whole system responsible for the war in Vietnam.

The sense that something more than demonstrations was needed coursed through radical circles on the eve of the November march. In
FIRE!
Weatherman charged that, “Marches on Washington won’t end the war because peace marches . . . can’t work in a fundamentally antidemocratic society.” According to Weatherman, the antiwar leadership

“constantly held back the political and tactical growth of the movement”

by believing that massing large numbers of people would persuade the

“small class of corporate imperialists” responsible for the war to relin-quish its power.24 Here the Weathermen approached Marcuse’s provocative assessment of the function of sanctioned dissent in a regime of “repressive tolerance,” such as he felt the United States to be: Within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. . . . The exercise of political rights . . . in a society of total administration serves to strengthen the administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.25

Insisting that “the real terms of the struggle are set by the most advanced actions,” like the Days of Rage, Weatherman endorsed the New Mobe march mainly as an opportunity to radicalize young demonstrators.

Weatherman declared bluntly, “It’s not so much that we’re against the war; we’re for the Vietnamese and their victory.”26

Less strident voices issued similar criticisms of the march. Seattle’s underground newspaper
The Helix
had freshly denounced the Days of Rage.

Yet it too complained that “mass actions of peaceful protest, in and of themselves, do little to achieve substantial change in American society.”

Alluding to the Nixon administration’s comments following the October Moratorium that it would not be influenced by the fall protests, the
Helix
flatly predicted that the November demonstrators would “see how useless their actions have been when once again they are ignored by Nixon

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and baited by Agnew and Mitchell” (Nixon in fact told reporters that he planned to watch college football on TV in the White House on the day of the November march, which he then did). Condemning the antiwar leadership for its efforts to court liberal support and to “isolate militants,” the
Helix
called for “massive militant action” to “raise the social and political cost” of the war.27 As the antiwar movement approached the greatest public display of its size and strength, it suffered its sharpest divisions.