The Pentagon: A History (53 page)

The holy of holies

The first round of trouble at 4
P.M.
was only a precursor for a second, more violent wave an hour later. Angry demonstrators surrounding the Mall plaza launched a three-pronged assault on the building. About a thousand protestors swarmed around the northeast corner of the plaza and moved on the River entrance, while another group broke off in the opposite direction toward the heliport and battled with troops manning roadblocks on Washington Boulevard. The main body of the crowd surged forward against the line of MPs at the Mall plaza, many of them cursing, throwing bottles and rocks, and slashing at soldiers with picket signs.

Frank Naughton, an Army military intelligence special agent posing as a reporter wearing slacks, a sports shirt, and a silly camera around his neck, saw a demonstrator kicking an MP who had fallen to the ground. Naughton, a big man, waded into the crowd and walloped the demonstrator. “I blew my cover,” he recalled.

A platoon of MPs ran out to reinforce the sagging line at the front edge of the Mall plaza, where steps led up from the lawn, but they were immediately overwhelmed by demonstrators who overran the rope barriers. In the ensuing struggle, many MPs were knocked to the ground, an Army report said, and thirteen tear-gas grenades “were seized by the demonstrators who proceeded to employ them against the troops.” As clouds of gas drifted about the Mall and River entrances, demonstrators, soldiers, and reporters alike gagged and felt their eyes burning; a female demonstrator fainted and at least one MP was overcome. Protest leaders later accused the Army of using tear gas; the Army indignantly blamed the demonstrators, and there is no evidence in the official record that the high command approved using tear gas. Based on eyewitness accounts and circumstantial evidence, it is fair to conclude that in the wild melee, both soldiers and demonstrators threw tear gas.

The protesters who had reached the Mall plaza also made good use of the worthless rope barriers. Knots were tied in the ropes and they were tossed down high walls that protected the plaza from the bulk of the demonstrators on the grassy triangle below. With the lines secured at the top, protesters below scaled the walls like mountain climbers to reach the plaza. Bill Ayers, a mop-haired, twenty-one-year-old militant from Michigan, watched the first wave of protesters climb the wall and then went up himself. The scene on the Mall plaza, with troops rushing about and tear gas floating in the air, felt to him like
Ten Days That Shook the World.

Inside, McGiffert watched the disintegrating scene with disquietude. “No reason to hold back now,” he told Christopher. More reinforcements were brought out of the building. At 5:05, 6th Cavalry troops burst out of the Mall entrance and ran down the steps with M-14 rifles and tried to restore order, and others were sent to the River and heliport sides.

It was not enough to stop the surging crowd. At 5:30, thirty demonstrators who had climbed a hill to the left of the Mall steps spotted an opening in the Army’s flank. They rushed through it and ran for an open door to the left of the main Mall entrance. The Army’s perimeter crumbled. Soon about two thousand demonstrators had broken through the Mall security line and pressed toward the building. The first thirty demonstrators, meanwhile, made it up the steps and victoriously stormed through the outer door. “The line was too thin and we just began pressing forward,” twenty-four-year-old Leonard Brody of New York later said. “We were so surprised we made it through, we kept looking around to see if it was true.” It was. The Pentagon—“the Holy of Holies,” Mailer called it—had been breached.

The “Seventh-Corridor Rush,” as it became known in Army reports, was the high-water mark of the march, but it did not last long. As soon as the protesters entered the door, a company of soldiers from the 91st Engineer Battalion waiting just inside the corridor came rushing out, smashing violently into the demonstrators. McNamara happened to be in the corridor and was nearly caught between the protesters and rushing soldiers. Kash, his bodyguard, pushed McNamara into the nearest office and held the door shut as the soldiers rushed by. The intruders were hit with rifle butts and driven back, leaving the steps spattered with blood. Four demonstrators made it past the inner door and into the building before they were pounced on by soldiers and roughly ejected. The entrance was secured by a thick wall of soldiers.

The Mall plaza remained in chaos. “They were closing ranks in front of the building, but by that time, hundreds and then thousands of people were up there,” Ayers recalled. Hundreds of protesters ran up to the Pentagon walls, chased through the bushes by soldiers and marshals. Some of the demonstrators hurled rocks at the building, breaking five windows, including two in the press room. Others scrawled obscenities onto the limestone façade. “Crush Imperialism with Sex,” someone wrote. Many took advantage of the opportunity to urinate on the building. Calling through bullhorns, protest leaders directed demonstrators to sit on the pavement and occupy the captured space.

In the operations center, General Johnson was fed up and urged force to clear out the intruders. “I think we ought to get some cold steel and start using some gas,” the Army chief of staff told Christopher at 5:44. Christopher did not rule out unsheathing bayonets and using tear gas but told Johnson they should wait. “We should first attempt to move the people back with troops,” the deputy attorney general said.

Yet the demonstration had peaked. As darkness fell, the crowd thinned, many boarding buses that were due to leave for distant cities, others trudging off on foot in search of something to eat. But several thousand hardcore protesters remained, including hundreds still occupying the Mall plaza. Johnson still wanted to use bayonets and gas to move them back. McNamara, after making another reconnaissance from the roof, turned him down. “Let boredom, hunger and cold take their course,” the secretary said.

Most protesters managed to stay warm. Numerous bonfires sprung up, fed by the placards, pamphlets, and debris. “[W]hat prehistoric forms the dark bulk of the Pentagon must have taken from its spark, how the figures studying them with field glasses must have looked—how much like gargoyles on the ridge of a cathedral,” Mailer wrote. Indeed, an intelligence report was soon sent to the Army operations center reporting on ten bonfires on the pavement and grass near the Mall entrance: “All are presently sitting around singing…. People appear to be cooking.”

Boredom and hunger did not seem to be much of a problem either. Teams of protesters were dispatched to get food and drink from stores. “Beer came in, sandwiches, it was Saturday night—Saturnalia came in: couples began to neck on the grass, some awed by their audacity, some stimulated by the proximity of the Pentagon,” Mailer wrote. The sweet smell of marijuana was everywhere.

Ayers celebrated on the Mall plaza with his girlfriend, Diana Oughton. “We sang and chanted, feeling jubilant to have gotten this close,” he later wrote. “I peed on the Pentagon. I burned my draft card a foot from the line of troops, threw the ash on the ground and spit on it.” A rumor—false, an investigation later established—swept the crowd that several soldiers had thrown down their weapons and defected, prompting wild cheers.

A three-quarters harvest moon rose over the Washington Monument. Around one fire in the middle of a road where the Mall and River sides meet, a group of young demonstrators sang “Down by the Riverside.” Soldiers standing nearby removed their sheathed bayonets from their rifles and fastened them to their waists.

McNamara, Resor, and McGiffert silently surveyed the scene from the secretary of the Army’s office overlooking the Mall. Colonel Graves stood behind them. The landscape around the Pentagon was lit by bonfires, illuminating the faces of the congregated demonstrators.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” McGiffert remarked.

Graves struggled to contain himself. “I had to bite my tongue,” he recalled. “I didn’t think it was very beautiful.”

Swept away

Whatever beauty there had been was quickly swept away. As the night wore on, Army commanders remained uneasy about the demonstrators still in the Mall plaza. McNamara, however, insisted “it would be a mistake to use force” unless the demonstrators were threatening the safety of others or damaging the building. Shortly before leaving the operations center around 11
P.M.,
McNamara reiterated that the demonstrators should be left where they were.

Trouble flared shortly before midnight when the marshals moved to evict demonstrators from a press trailer they had occupied on the plaza. Protesters around the trailer threw empty liquor bottles and kicked at soldiers and marshals. Chief U.S. Marshal James J. P. McShane—a burly former New York City policeman and onetime bodyguard for JFK—decided it was time to crack down. Soldiers from the 3rd Infantry Regiment at Fort Myer, in battle-dress uniforms, moved forward in a wedge, using rifle butts and boots to clear a path through the protesters, hitting them more indiscriminately than had the MPs who previously manned the line. Behind the wedge came the marshals, who clubbed dozens of demonstrators, even some lying passively, and dragged them off to be arrested. The restraint the government forces had shown most of the day disappeared. About three hundred were arrested during the sweep, more than had been during the day.

The absurdity was inescapable. In the critical first hours at the Pentagon, when a show of strength might have discouraged violence, the commanders’ hands were tied. Then, late at night, at a time when the situation was largely under control and the top command had gone home or was paying little attention, heads were bashed. The coveted image of restraint sought by McNamara and McGiffert—bought at the cost of the soldiers left without barricades and reinforcement when they were needed—was washed away.

By dawn, only about two hundred demonstrators remained on the cold pavement, Bill Ayers among them. Hundreds more returned during the day, and there were flurries of arrests when protesters tried to push through the lines. At midnight Sunday, when the Mobe’s forty-eight-hour demonstration permit expired, 150 remaining protesters sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they were arrested, put in vans, and hauled away.

Within minutes, crews began cleaning up the grounds. Workers carted away truckloads of debris, including beer cans, milk bottles, shoes, shirts, sweaters, and an unusual number of bras and panties. The last of the obscenities and slogans painted on the Pentagon walls were being cleaned off as employees arrived to work Monday morning. Official figures showed forty-five persons injured, seventeen of them seriously enough to be hospitalized. Injuries suffered by protesters included ten head wounds, a broken arm, and assorted hand, leg, and rib injuries; soldiers and marshals received eye and chest injuries. In all, 683 protesters were arrested, resulting in fifty-one jail terms of up to thirty-five days and $8,000 in fines.

O’Malley was seething, telling General Johnson and other senior Army commanders that his line at the Mall had been left too thin with no backup, and that his troops had taken “extreme physical and oral abuse” from the crowd. The delay caused by the need to get authority to use reserve troops “gravely hampered” the reaction to the violence, he said.

Nobody could argue with that. “Light military presence was directed in order to avoid bad press and to avoid inciting demonstrators,” Colonel George M. Bush, McGiffert’s military aide, told the under secretary. “I think that was fuzzy thinking…. I think we encouraged them to violation by not showing sufficient force.” McGiffert agreed the restrictions had been a mistake, and two subsequent after-action reports, by the Military District of Washington and the chief of staff’s office, reached the same conclusion.

Yet for all the missteps and miscalculations, the Army’s defense of the Pentagon could not be called a failure. No one had been killed, and not a shot had been fired, something McNamara remained proud of nearly four decades later. There had been no race riot; a black nationalist rally in Washington had been peaceful. Some three thousand Pentagon employees had been at work during the demonstration—not much less than on a normal Saturday—and all critical operations were manned. The Pentagon had not been shut down.

The antiwar movement itself won few hearts and minds that weekend, as the acts of a violent and abusive minority of protesters dominated press coverage and overshadowed the respectful message of peace that most demonstrators sought to convey. The 1967 march on the Pentagon would prove a defining moment of division in the country, one that hardened attitudes on both sides.

A full load

Robert McNamara was waiting when the limousine carrying President Lyndon B. Johnson pulled into the Pentagon garage beneath the River entrance. It was shortly before noon on February 29, 1968, McNamara’s last day at the Pentagon. Johnson, increasingly at odds with McNamara over how to handle the war, had nominated him several weeks after the Pentagon march to be president of the World Bank. McNamara would later say that he did not know whether he had been fired. (“The answer was that he had been,” David Halberstam wrote in
The Best and the Brightest.
)

Out on the River terrace parade ground, a military honor guard and an audience of a thousand dignitaries and Pentagon workers waited under a leaden sky for the farewell ceremony to “the man known as the most efficient secretary in history,” as the
Star
called him. A hard, cold rain began to fall.

Johnson and McNamara, accompanied by a retinue of aides, climbed into the elevator to ride up to the second floor, where they would descend the steps leading from the River entrance to join the ceremony. Master Sergeant Clifford Potter, the elevator operator, worked the controls. The elevator, packed with thirteen passengers, lurched and began rising, and then came to a quiet stop. At first no one suspected there was a problem, and then the reality set in: The president of the United States, the secretary of defense, and a host of aides were stuck on an elevator inside the Pentagon. Presidential aide Lawrence Levinson, one of those crammed into the elevator, wondered if a coup were underway.