1968 - Mark Kurlansky [8]
On a Saturday in late October 1967, the Mobe had organized an antiwar demonstration in Washington, with protesters gathering at the Lincoln Memorial and then crossing the Potomac to march on the Pentagon. An antiwar activist from Berkeley, Jerry Rubin, was there with a New York City friend from the civil rights movement, Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman managed to grab media attention during the Washington march by promising to levitate the Pentagon and exorcize it by spinning it around. He did not deliver on his promise. Norman Mailer was there and wrote about it in Armies of the Night, which was to become one of the most read and praised books of 1968. The poet Robert Lowell, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, and editor Dwight MacDonald were among the marchers. These were more than just spoiled and privileged draft-dodging kids, which had been the popular way to characterize the antiwar movement or, as Mailer put it more sympathetically in his book, “the drug illumined and revolutionary young of the American middle class.” This was clearly becoming a broad-based and diverse movement. “Join us!” demonstrators shouted at the soldiers guarding the besieged Pentagon, as though intoxicated by their sudden power to recruit more and more supporters.
In the first week of 1968, five men, including Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author and pediatrician, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University, were indicted on charges of conspiring to counsel young men to violate the draft law. In New York City, Dr. Spock said that he hoped “one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or even five hundred thousand young Americans either refuse to be drafted or to obey orders if in the military.” Spock’s arrest in particular garnered attention because conservatives for some time had been blaming what they termed his permissive approach to child rearing for creating this spoiled and quarrelsome generation. But after the arrests, a New York Times editorial stated, “It is significant that the two best- known leaders of this challenge to the draft are a pediatrician and a college chaplain, men especially sensitive to young America’s current moral dilemma.”
On January 4, Bruce Brennan, a thirteen-year-old from Long Island with shoulder-length hair, was charged with truancy. His mother, who owned the Clean Machine, a shop where Bruce worked that sold psychedelic paraphernalia and peace symbols, and his father, the president of a management consulting firm, said that Bruce was being singled out because of his involvement in the peace movement. The youth said he had missed school eleven times because of illness and twice to march in peace demonstrations. The mother said her son had become involved in the movement when he was twelve.
Despite all of this opposition, Lyndon Johnson, after five years in office, seemed a solid favorite to win another term. A Gallup poll released on January 2 showed that just less than half the population, 45 percent, believed it was a mistake to have gotten involved in Vietnam. On that same day, an hour and twenty minutes before the end of the New Year’s cease-fire, 2,500 Viet Cong attacked a U.S. infantry fire support base fifty miles northwest of Saigon in an area of rubber plantations, killing 26 Americans and wounding 111. These were the first Americans to die in Vietnam in 1968. The U.S. government reported 344 Viet Cong killed. The United States had a policy of reporting the number of enemy bodies left on the field—a Vietnam War propaganda innovation called “the body count”—as though if the tally rose high enough, America would be declared the winner.
A Republican state-by-state survey released at the beginning of the year indicated that their only hope to unseat Johnson was New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Richard