intellectuals and the war machine

8/13/2019 Intellectuals and the War Machine

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University of Northern Iowa

The Intellectuals &the War MachineAuthor(s): Denise LevertovSource: The North American Review, Vol. 253, No. 1 (Jan., 1968), pp. 11-14, 16-20Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25116719.

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The importancef this event shouldbe clear... Over2000leaders f America'sntellectual ife havesolemnly ommittedhemselvesoopendisobedienceof the law; lawtheyconsiderunjustand immoral.Manyof themundoubtedly ould not havemade sucha decision3,2, or even 1 yearago. Theestablished,legalchannelsfor expressionof thewill of thepeoplehavebroken own.

The Intellectuals

The War Machineby Denise Levertov

The Pentagon March and Sit-in on October 21st, aswas to be expected of so dramatic an event, involvingso many thousands of people, made front-page headlines in the nation's newspapers. Unfortunately, the reports presented by a press whose vision is, to say theleast, astigmatic, were distorted. Not only was thesit-in itself widely misrepresented as an irresponsibleand violent occurrence perpetrated by 'riff-raff anddrop-outs,' but even the more intelligent and thoughtful reporters and commentators failed to place it in itscontext, underplaying or ignoring other highly significant but less sensational anti-war actions of the weekof October 16th/21st. It is necessary in the interestsof historical accuracy and of our not-so-good (but notyet hopeless) national moral health to set these eventsin better focus.

First of all it is important to remember that themovement of anti-war activity from protest to resistancehtas occurred after years of conventional protest thathave produced no effect on the Government's policy inViet Nam (though they have had an educative andstimulating effect on large numbers of people. Thesteps from the advertisements in the New York Times(and elsewhere) signed by every kind of professional3 years ago, and from the teach-ins and read-ins thatseemed bold 2 years ago, to the widespread civil disobedience of the Fall of 1967, have not been sudden,impulsive, impatient, and certainly not irresponsible,but on the contrary have been the gravely consideredsteps taken by a growing number of deeply conscientious citizens who have first tried every other meansat their command?including the giving of their vote

to Johnson in 1964 because he promised all things opposite to those he has done.On October 20th?the day before the Pentagonmarch?there took place inWashington an action thathas received relatively little publicity but which in itsimplications may turn out to be of considerable im

portance. This was the delegation to the AttorneyGeneral's office at the Department of Justice of clergy,college professors, writers, and other professional people, to declare their full support of the young men whoare actively resisting the draft, and to declare their intention of continuing to counsel, aid, and abet thesedraft-resisters.

The background to this action is as follows: lastspring my husband, Mitchell Goodman, while teachingat Stanford University for a term (in a special program, The Voice Project) met, and was deeply impressed by the courage and sincerity of a group ofyoung men calling themselves The Resistance, who, notcontent to blithely accept 2S deferment, were puttingthemselves in jeopardy for the sake of their principles.He was active in helping to form a supportive group ofolder people, later headed by Dr. Genevi?ve Knupferof the Stanford U. Medical School, committed to theassistance of these boys in their effort to locate andencourage others of like views; and on his return tothe East was intent on gathering together a similargroup of older people in the professions to act in soli

DENISE LEVERTOV'S most recent hook is The Sorrow Dance,issued hy 'New Directions. She and her hushand, Mitchell Qoodman, are active in the draft resistance movement.

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darity with Eastern war-resisters. In New York, 'Support in Action' (started by Grace Paley, Karl Bissinger, and Paul Goodman with headquarters at the Greenwich Village Peace Center) had proposed a similarsupportive role, but there seemed to be little responsein this area as compared to the West Coast (where,for example, in May 1967, 45 members of the Stanford Faculty had signed a pledge to 'acts of mass civildisobedience designed to stop the war in Viet Nam.'Signatories included 8 full professors in the MedicalSchool, members of the campus ministry, the Counselling and Testing Center, the High Energy Physics Lab,and many of Stanford's most distinguished professorsin the Departments of Chemistry, Health, Physics, English, Statistics, History, Economics, Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, and Speech and Drama.The Stanford pledge stated in part that:

We do not want to protest the war any longer; we wantto stop it. We are prepared, through mass civil disobedience, to say NO to our government. . . .We can not becertain that such acts will stop the war. We do believe,however, that nothing else has any chance of stopping it.If only 10% of those who marched against the war on

April 15th will involve themselves in such an action, wemight realistically hope to reverse the escalating murderand suffering.And the press release that went out to announce the

signing of this pledge quoted amemorandum stating that'The "We Won't Go" Movement among draft-age youthrepresents an extreme, potentially effective, and apparently infectious development in the society' and thatthere is 'a great need for an analogous activity amongthose who are past draft age.') Easterners seemed moreslowly aroused. Personal letters sent out by my husband, after his return from the West Coast, to variousacademic people of our acquaintance, brought sympathetic but inconclusive replies. So, knowing that theResistance groups which had by then established themselves in many locations across the country were planning a concerted draft-refusal action on October 16th,in the middle of the summer he and I and Henry

Braun (a poet and teacher who is our summer neighbor inMaine) sat down together in our kitchen, and(under the heading Conscientious Resistance) drafteda Call to Action, which we had printed locally andsent out to our own friends and acquaintances amongacademics, writers, and artists?a list of approximately250 names. (So much for those who chronically enquire, 'But who's behind it, that's what / want toknow' )This call read in part:To the Clergy, the Men and Women of the Professions,the Teachers: A Call for Conscientious Resistance to the

War and to the Threat of Militarism: It is impossible,Thoreau said during the Mexican War, to be associatedwith "this American government" without being disgraced.It was a war, he said, to which "the people would nothave consented" at the outset. The time had come, he said,for honest men to resist.He speaks for all of us now. We are a dishonorablepeople in the hands of a degraded government. The Executive, with the connivance of the military, now dominates that government. For purposes of war and peace,of life and death, the President is a quasi-dietator, with nomandate from the electorate. In the Tonkin Gulf Reso

lution (that Sen, Fulbright calls one of the most tragicmistakes in our history) the Senate blindly abdicated itsconstitutional obligation to "advise and consent" on foreign policy. A cynical Congress cheers the General conducting the most barbaric of wars, when he is broughtfrom Viet Nam to counteract the effect of massive demonstrations against the war. The same President who hastotally ignored the huge no-larger-war mandate of the1964 elections, now uses the military to sell his viciouspolicy to the country.

We are an unrepresented people. At the very momentwhen Americans in large numbers are awakening andturning against the war, we are bombing within a hair ofChina. Step by step we have been led to the brink ofworld war.

WE HAVE NEVER CONSENTED. We have protested?and have had our protests ignored when they werenot sneered at by a President who is pure politician, aruthless manipulator, a man who has steadily and dangerously eroded what remains of the democratic process.Senator Young of Ohio has condemned what he callsthe assumption by the military of "an increasingly larger role in formulating national policy." The New YorkTimes calls this the "most alarming" aspect of the Vietnam war. If our representatives in Congress cannot orwill not control the military and its overbearing Commander-in-Chief, then we must do it ourselves, by an actof personal representation."Unjust laws exist" Thoreau exclaimed. "Shall we becontent to obey them . . . or shall we transgress themat once?"

It is an unjust system of involuntary military servitudethat is the key to this unjust war. The new draft law,even more unjust than the old one, is now being resistedby tens of thousands of young men, many in passive refusal, others in active resistance. Many of these youngmen have gone underground; thousands of others haveleft the country; still others have resisted openly by refusing or pledging to refuse to serve when called. Thosewho oppose the war in this way face long jail sentences.They need our support, now?the kind of support that requires courage to equal their own. They tell us that thetime for protest is behind us?that basic human decencyrequires resistance to the war. THEY ARE RIGHT. Theyare right as the Abolitionists, the Suffragettes, the Civil

Rights campaigners were right. As the Nuremburg Trialwas right.. . . The draft law commands that we shall not aid,abet or counsel men to refuse the draft. But as a groupof the clergy have recently said, when young men refuse to allow their conscience to be violated by an unjust law and a criminal war, then it is necessary for theirelders?their teachers, ministers, friends to make cleartheir committment, in conscience, to aid, abet, and counsel them against conscription. Most of us have alreadydone this privately. Now publicly we will demonstrate,side by side with these young men, our determination tocontinue to do so.Our original intention, as described in this first Call,was to hold our demonstration at the Pentagon onOct. 16th. But we soon came to realize that this would

be impractical for a relatively small group (we wereintent on 'quality,' that is to say on gathering a groupof recognizably sober citizens, well-informed peopleof status and fame, rather than on quantity) and moreover we learned just after the Call was mailed that theMobilization Committee had decided to hold its massive demonstration at the Pentagon on the 21st. Itwas necessary therefore to change our locale. MitchGoodman went down toNew Haven to consult with the

Rev. William Sloane Coffin, the Protestant Chaplain at

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IIIIMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllM'To he Clergy,theMen andWomenof the Professions,he Teachers: call forConscientious eistanceto theWarand to the Threat fMilitarism:It is impossible, horeauaidduring heMexicanWar,tobeassociatedwith "thisAmericanovernment"ithoutbeing disgraced. Itwas a war, he said, to which"the peoplewould not have consented" t the outset. The timehadcome,he said,forhonestmen toresist.'llllllllllllllllllllllllllllMllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Yale, whose cogency and courage have made him aleader in the Peace Movement (and in many ways anatural successor to the late Rev. A. J. Muste, whoup to his death early this year at the age of 80 wassuch a source of inspiration to all who worked forpeace, and whose memory continues to give us hope).Mr. Coffin suggested that we make the Department ofJustice the objective of our action?an appropriate objective since we were dealing specifically with an issueof law?and outlined a plan of procedure for the occasion. This change of locale, together with a description of what we would do there, was announced in asecond Call; and by the time this mailing went out,Conscientious Resistance had joined forces with theResist group whose statement, 'A Call to Resist Ille

gitimate Authority'* had meanwhile appeared in theNew York Review of Books, the New Republic, andelsewhere. (It should be noted that 'The Resistance' isthe general name for the loosely-knit groups of youngmen of draft age who are refusing to comply with eitherinduction or deferment; while 'Resist' is the group ofolder people who put out the Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority. The group whose beginnings I havebeen describing is 'Conscientious Resistance.' It is likely that the two latter groups, as well as 'Support in Action,' whose aims are identical and which acted conceitedly atWashington, will soon merge under a singlename.)This second mailing, then, went out not only to thoseto whom we had sent the first Call, but to those whohad signed the Resist Statement; and additionally toa part of the mailing list of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about the War in Viet Nam. The 'first edition'had been sent out over the signatures only of MitchellGoodman, Henry Braun, and myself; the 'second edition' (in which the text I have quoted remained unchanged) carried also the names of William SloaneCoffin, Noam Chomsky (of M.I.T.) and Dwight Mc

Donald, representing 'Resist'; and noted that amongthose who had already committed themselves to participation in this action were Robert Lowell, NormanMailer, Ashley Montagu, Arthur Waskow (of the Institute for Policy Studies) and professors from most of

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiniiiiiiiiiiMiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiithe major universities and colleges in the East.Although we ourselves?the originators of the Call?and many others who had sent in their names, were infull accord with the National Mobilization Committee'splans for a mass demonstration at the Pentagon onOctober 21st, we felt that there were many personswho, though they would want to participate in the Department of Justice action, would be hesitant aboutthe Mobilization because it had been rumored (falsely, as it turned out) that H. Rap Brown and otherBlack Nationalists would 'take it over' and that it

might become an occasion of violence, even of fullscale riot. Therefore we carefully made it clear that ourproposal was 'independent of any other taking placeinWashington in October.' Only those who, as individuals, wished to, would stay on to participate in themarch on the following day.On October 2nd a press conference took place at theNew York Hilton. The large room was filled with reporters and television cameras, and the conferencelasted 2 hours. Coverage in the 'media,' however, waspoor. The NY Times in its city edition the next day dida fairly good job (though it reported Mitch Goodmanas stating that the demonstrations planned for WestCoast locations to coincide with ours were arranged by'students' whereas in fact they were organized bymiddleaged professionals like ourselves); but subsequent editions omitted the names of all but two of thespeakers at the news conference, mentioning only William Sloane Coffin and Mitchell Goodman. The speakers whose names were left out were: Noam Chomsky,Dr. Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, Ashley Montague,Paul Goodman, Dwight McDonald, Mark Raskin, Arthur Waskow, and, representing the draft-age youth,Ron Young of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Amongthose present, but not on the speakers' platform, wereStanley Kunitz, Nat Hentoff, Richard Mumma (Presbyterian Chaplain at Harvard), Paul Lauter, RobertEdenbaum of Temple University, William Davidon thephysicist from Haverford College, and other notableintellectuals. One of the reporters asked Dr. Spock ifhe would actually be willing to go to jail. He replied,'No one wants to go to jail, but yes, I am prepared to

'A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority' has 8 points, which I summarize: 1) We share the moral outrage of the young men who refuse toparticipate in this war. 2) We deny the legality and constitutionality of the war (as undeclared and moreover violating the UN Charter). 3) Wedeclare the actions of the US in Vietnam to be war crimes as defined by the Geneva Conventions of 1949. 4) We believe denial of draft exemptionto those who, while not complete pacifists, object to what they consider an unjust war, is unconstitutional. 5) Therefore we believe that every freeman has a legal and moral duty to exert every effort to end this war, to avoid collusion with it, and to encourage others to do the same. 6) Wesupport all forms of nonviolent noncooperation with the war. Most of us believe that open resistance to it is the course of action most likely tobring an end to the war. however. 7) We will raise funds, to supply legal defense and bail, support families, and organize draft resistance unions;and otherwise aid resistance to the war in whatever ways may seem appropriate. 8) We believe our statement is the sort of speech that under the1st Amendment must be free. We feel we cannot shrink from fulfilling our responsibilities to the youth many of us teach, to the country whosefreedom we cherish, and to the ancient traditions of religion and philosophy which we strive to preserve in this generation. 9) We call upon menof good will to join us in this confrontation with immoral authority. Especially we call on the universities to fulfill their mission of enlightenment,and religious organizations to honor their heritage of brotherhood. Now is the time to resist.The long list of signers includes (as well as names I have mentioned in the text of this article) Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Wilfred Sheed, MurielRukeyser, Philip Roth, Dr. Martin Niemoller, Linus Pauling, Herbert Kohl, George P. Elliott, Robert Brustein, Robert McAfee Brown, and ThomasMerton.

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go to jail for this principle.' How curious it is thatthis man, whose name is a household word, was onthis occasion not judged 'newsworthy' The Times inits fuller city edition did mention this interchange; butit too was cut out of later editions. Nor was it widelyreported elsewhere.On the 16th of October young men of the Resistance?over a thousand of them?publicly destroyed orhanded in their draft-cards at locations across thecountry, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver, Portland (Oregon), Chicago, Minneapolis, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Providence, R. I., New York, Albany, Philadelphia, Ithaca,N. Y., and Washington. The ceremony at Boston wasone of the most impressive and, thanks to the BostonGlobe especially (though the Boston Herald also didquite well by it), one of the best-reported. '67 BURNDRAFT CARDS IN BOSTON: 214 Turn In Cards,5000 at Rally' said the Globe's frontpage headlines onOct. 17th. And above the headlines, at the very topof the page, was this quotation:

We owe it to our conscience, to the people of this country,to the principles of American democracy, to declare our independence of this war, to resist it in every way we can, until itcomes to an end, until there is peace in Vietnam.Howard ZinnBoston University Professor.

Here at least was one major newspaper of courage andhonesty. The story under the headlines reported howthe 214 who turned in, rather than burning, their draftcards, gave them into the hands of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergymen. The 67 who chose to burntheir cards did so at the altar of the church. 'The massburn-in, turn-in ceremony followed a morning rally onBoston Common attended by some 5000 anti-war andanti-draft demonstrators. Students, faculty members andclergymen from many New England colleges, universities, and seminaries applauded vigorously as nine rallyspeakers assailed the war. . . .' "I am simply ashamed,deeply ashamed, to call myself an American" ' theGlobe went on to quote from Howard Zinn's speech.' "When I read, and in the most conservative papers,that the U.S. Airforce has bombed, again and again,the residential areas of North Vietnamese cities, that ithas bombed, again and again ? too often to be anaccident ? villages that are devoid of military significance ? that it has bombed a hospital for lepers inNorth Vietnam 13 times ... I am ashamed, and Iwant to dissociate myself from these acts. That is not

my idea of what America should stand for." 'The continuation of the story on another page was headed'100 Ministers Join Protest' and it quoted Ray Munro,former editor of B. U. News and now a graduate student at Harvard ('Jail is an honorable alternative toserving inVietnam'), Dr. Dana McLean Greeley, president of the Unitarian Universalist Association ... ('Ido not know what justifies a nation in forcing youngmen to fight and die for a cause in which they do notbelieve. That is not democracy, it is totalitarianism.And it is not freedom, by tyranny"), Dr. Harold FrayJr. of the Eliot Church of Newton and the Committee

of Religious Concern for Peace ('What does it profita nation to impose its military might upon peoples of

the world, while in doing so it loses its own soul?') andthe Rev. William Sloane Coffin (\ . .To hundreds ofhistory's most revered heroes, not to serve the state hasappeared the best way to love one's neighbor').Of all the demonstrations all over the country on the16th of October, the one most people heard about wasthe one towards which the most police hostility wasshown, and which therefore became bloody enough toengage the interest of the average newspaper. At Oakland, California, demonstrators from the whole BayArea converged on the Induction Center, not only torefuse the draft but to block, at least for a symbolicday, the entrance to it of the busloads of inducteesdaily brought in from all over the California coast. Ahundred and twenty five demonstrators including JoanBaez and her mother and sister were arrested ? notgently ? that day. But the thousands of others ?never less than 2000 on any day ? came back onTuesday; and though a peak of police brutality wasreached on that day, with clubbings and the use of teargas and 'chemical mace' (the new anti-riot weapon,the long-range after-effects of which on eyes and skinare not yet known), all directed upon unarmed demonstrators who were sitting down: nevertheless the protesters came back Wednesday, and Thursday, and Friday. And by Friday they had adopted new tactics;they no longer attempted to mass in front of the Induction Center in direct confrontation with the police;instead they spread out to block traffic in the surrounding streets, and they no longer sat down, butstood ? 'eye to eye with the cops' as one participantput it. Many, by Friday, wore motorcycle, football, orconstruction helmets, and instead of the usual cardboard picket signs carried heavy wooden shields. Butthey continued to practice non-violence. And on thatday only 28 were arrested, only 23 injured (none seriously) out of an estimated 5000. Did the changedstrategy confuse the authorities ? or is it possible thatsuch persistence had at least some temporary effect onthe authoritarian psychology?One of the most important facts to note and to remember is that the draft-age war refusers are boys ofhigh intelligence who would have no difficulty inmaintaining their 2S status and going on to graduateschool if they chose to. Their action is strictly one ofdisinterested principle. As a U.S. Senator, himself thatrare quantity, a politician with principles and humaneimagination, said to me a few days later, 'They arenoble and heroic'.

On October 20th the cards that had been given intothe safekeeping of the clergy, as in Boston, and facsimiles of those that had been destroyed or turned inelsewhere on the 16th, were brought toWashington byrepresentatives of the various 'Resistance' groups (theadult supportive groups having raised the money forthem to fly in). At 1 p.m., upwards of 500 professional people met in the hall of the Church of the Reformation, kindly lent by its Pastor (not himself a participant). With us were perhaps 40 of the 'Resistance'youths. Clergy were well represented, as were poetsand other professional writers; but the vast majority

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were academics from different fields, and of these?asI know precisely from the list of those present whichwas compiled on the spot? 90% were of professorialrank, including heads of departments from several universities. Biology, physics, math, music, art, classics,English, various branches of medicine, political scienceand history, economics ? these and other disciplineswere represented by some of their most distinguishedscholars. I mention at random Seymour Melman ofColumbia, R. W. B. Lewis of Yale, Donald Kalish ofUCLA, Alfred Conrad of CCNY, Leo Hamalian ofCCNY, Gordon Rogoff of Yale, Patrick Gallagher ofGeorge Washington University, Richard Ohmann ofWesleyan. Among the writers were Norman Mailer,Robert Lowell, Robert Duncan, Adrienne Rich, Galway Kinnell, Robert Bly, John Logan, Walter Lowenfels, Lou Lipsitz, Jim Harrison, Louis Simpson, andGrace Paley ? to name but a few. Writers who werenot able to be present but who have committed themselves to further action include Richard Wilbur, SusanSontag, Studs Terkel, Hayden Carruth. Yet the NewYork Times described this as a gathering of 'studentsand young writers' (And they did so on an insidepage, at the end of a long and detailed account of theextensive military preparations being made to defendthe Pentagon from invasion.)

Having assembled, all those present signed a furtherbrief statement testifying to their knowledge of the penalties incurred under the law for interfering in any waywith the draft or encouraging others to resist it (upto 5 years in jail or up to $10,000 fine). After a briefing on the order of affairs, we then walked by a prearranged route to the Department of Justice buildingon Constitution Avenue, where we had secured permission to hold a meeting. A bus was on hand totransport some of the older participants the 2-mile distance. On the shallow steps of the Justice building,where we had installed a loudspeaker system, the Reverend Gracie (Episcopalian, of Philadelphia) invokeda blessing on the proceedings, and he, Dr. Spock, Robert Lowell, William Sloane Coffin, and some of theyoung draft-refusers, addressed the crowd of about 600,which was mainly composed of participants and newsmen. (There are few pedestrian passers-by on Constitution Avenue at that hour of the afternoon.) Thesebrief speeches were reconfirmations of our purpose inbeing there. There followed the ceremony ? solemnand quiet ? of the draft cards from all over the country being brought up to the speakers' stand, where they

were placed in a large briefcase; and when this hadbeen done, individuals ? most of them young professors ? came up to add their cards to the others, someof them making a short personal statement as they didso.

By the time all the cards ? over a thousand ?had been collected it was 3 p.m., the hour at which anappointment had been made for a delegation to enterthe building and seeMr. John McDonough, theAssistant

Deputy Attorney General. (Our request had been, ofcourse, to meet with the Attorney General himself, butwhen granted an appointment with 'the third man

down', that seemed reasonable and was accepted withgood grace.) This delegation, to present at the chiefseat of Law these documents of refusal to comply withthe law and to declare our complicity with that refusal, was composed of Dr. Spock, R. W. B. Lewis,Arthur Waskow, Mark Raskin, Seymour Melman, William Sloane Coffin, and Mitchell Goodman, togetherwith four young men of 'The Resistance.' After theyhad entered the building (passing, under escort, theheavy police guard at the doors) Norman Mailer, NoamChomsky, Mrs. Spock, and others, including amongthe 'Resistance' speakers Gary Rader, the young warresister who once was a wearer of the Green Beret,made brief speeches, interrupted from time to time by5 members of the American Nazi Party, who shouted'WeWant Dead Reds' from the borders of the crowd.

Mrs. Benjamin Spock, petite and elegant, addressedwomen especially with a plea that they encourage andsupport their men in their conscientious dissent, andnot let fear of jail-sentences deter them. Show yourlove for them by backing them when they do right, washer message. 'When Ben says to me about somethinglike this, Shall I do it?

?I say to him, Go ahead '

A?1In my own statement I tried to make the point that

writers, and especially writers who are also teachers,had a special responsibility: since we were particularly articulate people we had the frequent privilege of

making our words heard ? in print, in public, in class,in conferences with students ? and had used thisprivilege to speak against the war and the draft; therefore we had all the more obligation to back up ourwords with our deeds, to show our readers and students that we had not been 'just talking,' but that wemeant what we said. (The distinguished German writer Hans Egon Holthusen, commenting recently in theFrankfurter Algemeine Zeitung on a World PoetryConference held in Montreal in September at which Ihad spoken on this obligation of the writer and on theneed to move from 'protest to resistance,' insisted thatI was, 'nat?rlich,' only using a metaphor. This is thekind of genial misunderstanding the sober, thoughtful,growing, and increasingly determined Peace Movementhas to overcome, along with its dismissal by reportersand the ill-informed as 'a bunch of crazy hippies andteeny boppers' etc.)When the delegation to the Asst. Deputy Attorney

General emerged once more ? after an hour's interview ? Mr. Coffin came to the microphone and reported on what had happened. Members of the grouphad made formal challenges of the legal validity andmoral defensibility of the draft in its context of an undeclared war, undesired by those asked to fight it, andhad received the expectable stock answers. Then hadcome the crux of the matter: the attempt to put into thehands of the law, personified by one of its highestrepresentatives, voluntary evidence of our shared

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'crime.' Mr. McDonough waved it away. 'What?' hewas asked, 'you refuse to accept the legal responsibilities of your office? To whom, then, if not to you, shouldthese documents, the evidence of our liability to jailsentences or heavy fines, be delivered?' There was noanswer ? only a repeated refusal to accept them. Finally the evidence that the law refused to look at wassimply left on the desk of the Asst. Deputy AttorneyGeneral ? whence, of course, it soon passed into thehands of the FBI, who began, within a few days, toquestion the draft-card returners. The complicity andsupport of the women and non-draft-eligible men hasat the time of writing continued to be officially ignored.Our intention is to pursue our commitment until weforce the administration to stop sweeping our actionsunder the rug.The importance of this event should be clear, I hope,to the readers of the North American Review: Over2000 leaders of America's intellectual life have solemnly committed themselves to open disobedience ofthe law; a law they consider unjust and immoral. Manyof them undoubtedly would not have made such a decision 3, 2, or even 1 year ago. The established, legalchannels for expression of the will of the people havebroken down. Those who believe that in committingCivil Disobedience they are serving the best interest oftheir country, and that only by a breaking of immorallaws can the principles of just law be removed andrectified, are a minority, strictly speaking: but they area minority constituted of the most thoughtful, most developed, most genuinely respectable. As such theyconstitute a spearhead; each of them represents morethan himself, represents those many who on Octobef20th this year were not yet quite ready for such a stepbut who, encouraged by seeing these leaders take it,willfollow them before long ? unless the war ends. Thatis why I believe itwas an event of historic importance,not to be ignored by any serious student of this country's history.The 100,000-150,000 who attended the rally at theLincoln Memorial next day, the 80,000 who continuedin a 4-mile march across the Memorial bridge and tothe Pentagon north parking lot (the area for which apermit had been granted) and the 4,000 (at the peak)who crossed police lines to sit in on the Pentagon terrace from about 5 p.m. Saturday until late on Sunday(with a lessening number remaining steadfastly until thelast 200 were arrested at midnight Sunday) were overwhelmingly the same kinds of people and their younger counterparts: members of the most thoughtful, courageous, and well-informed segment of the educatedand privileged classes. Yes, there was violence at thePentagon. But it was violence inflicted ? much of itunder cover of darkness ? by the military and policeforces massed there by a government that collectively? whatever the I.Q. of its individual members may be? is too stupid to understand what non-violent resistance

means; a force of 10,000 soldiers, police, and hastilysworn-in U.S. marshalls, armed with billy clubs, teargas, rifles, and bayonets, to defend a vast fortressagainst men and women armed with nothing but their

bare hands and their earnest consciences. The rifleswere not loaded and the bayonets were sheathed; nevertheless this show of physical force was absurd andtragic in its disproportion. Had it been only a show,the scale weighing the absurd and the tragic might havetipped on the side of absurdity. But the billy clubs,the rifle butts, and the tear gas were used. Heads werebroken. Blood flowed. Demonstrators crossing the police lines were not simply arrested, they were knockeddown and savagely beaten (especially about the headand over the kidneys). In the night, the hands and feetof the sitters-in were deliberately stepped on; bodieswere kicked; dozing girls were pulled out of the sitters' line by their long hair. Earlier in the day, at leastone group of distinguished demonstrators, includingNoam Chomsky, Dagmar Wilson, Barbara Deming, andDave Dellinger, arrested before they had even reachedthe line? marked by a rope ? which they had beenabout to cross, were kept in a stationary, locked, airless paddywagon in Washington's Indian-summer afternoon heat for over an hour, their request that thevents be opened refused. Not all of the police, soldiers,and marshalls acted brutally, obviously; and to differentshifts of them, during the 34-odd hours of the 'siege,'it seemed that different orders had been given. Butthere was a great deal of wanton violence ? and evena little was too much. No one expected that they wouldlet us walk in, unobstructed, naturally; but the demonstrators could have been restrained and arrested with

out being beaten and mistreated. That there was nota riot of the bloodiest kind is a tribute to the steadfastly peaceful purposes of the demonstrators. Yet itwas the military and police that were congratulated fortheir 'restraint' by the press. Here is a typical exampleof such misplaced congratulation, taken from a Nov.5th editorial in 'Grit', whose large circulation (1,153881 weekly) is mainly in the rural areas:

Observers say that many well-meaning, though misguided,citizens helped form the throng at the capital, but that in the endit was taken over by the political hippies, or lunatic fringe, whotried to storm the Pentagon and defied orders to disperse uponexpiration of the permit for the assembly. Fortunately, throughthe security precautions taken by Secretary of Defense McNamara and his aids the violence was held to a minimum.It is tragic that such 'observers' cannot distinguish

scholars, teachers, clergy, writers, artists of highachievement, and students in good standing at the bestcolleges, from a 'lunatic fringe.'What have that week's activities ? from coast tocoast, and from churches and induction centers to theJustice Department and the Pentagon achieved?

Within the Peace Movement, they have given stimulus and encouragement to further actions: actions whichbegan only a few hours after the last demonstratorswere carried away to the paddywagons at midnightSunday. By Monday noon, a group of students just returned from Washington were already picketing the Institute for Defense Analysis at Princeton, to protest thatuniversity's involvement in war research. Within daysthere were sit-ins and pickets at Harvard, Brown, Oberlin, Yale, Indiana, CCNY, Columbia, Berkeley?namethe campus, and it has had, or is having, or will havehad by the time this article appears, some form of pro

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test demonstration against such involvement, most ofthem directed specifically against campus recruiting bythe armed forces, the CIA, and the manufacturers ofwar products. The debate on this issue continuesalong with the protests: is it an infringement of freespeech to prevent those who wish to be interviewed bythe spokesmen for these organizations from fulfillingtheir wishes? Or is it a violation of the ideals of higher education for university administrators to give theirtacit approval to the war by permitting these recruiterson campus? Could they not, as one Oberlin studentsuggested, hold their office hours in the local Post

Office, or some other Federal building off-campus?Some student bodies, notably those of Columbia andFordham, have voted to let interviewing policies now inforce continue. Others are proposing that if the interviewers are to continue to come on campus, they do soon condition that they agree to engage in public discussion of the moral and physical issues involved. Itis a matter obviously closely related to the holding byuniversities of government contracts for research inchemical warfare and other morally questionable fields

?contracts which some institutions of learning, under pressure from indignant students and faculty, havealready relinquished, but which many still hold. Itis of major importance that these questions have beenraised. Even at those colleges where the vote has favored the continuance of campus recruitment, it isclear that the issue is not therefore a dead one. Thosewho have opposed it will continue to do so, becausemoral outrage is not appeased by a vote. And if thesestudents and faculty are dismissed, others will take theirplace. The Dow Chemical representatives focus particularly strong feeling; for while non-pacifists who areopposed to this war, but not to all war, may see somerational justification for students being told somethingabout career prospects in the armed forces in the sameway that they are told about careers in business andindustry, they are keenly aware that to be expected,within the confines of what are supposed to be placesof humane study, to entertain the producers of napalm,a genocidal atrocity, and be invited to join them, is aninsult to their 'hearts and minds,' those twin functionscollege presidents are so fond of referring to.

Among other post-Pentagon-Sit-in events has beenthe spectacular one in Baltimore on October 27th whenFather Philip Berrigan, S.J., Thomas Lewis, of 'ArtistsConcerned about Vietnam/ David Eberhardt, secretaryof the Baltimore Interfaith Peace Mission, and the Rev.James Mengel, of the United Church of Christ, pouredcontainers full of blood, some of it their own, into 17file drawers at an Induction Center. This?like, for instance, Mitchell Goodman's standing up at the National Book Awards ceremony last February to publicly

challenge Vice-Pr?sident Humphrey ? is the sort ofaction that immediately raises the cry 'Bad Taste ' fromgentle civilized folk. But those who do these things arethemselves gentle and civilized ? so gentle and civilized, in fact, that their outrage and anguish at the atrocities of war cause them to overcome their fear ofseeming excessive. They should be honored for theiracts, performed in the face of a war whose taste is vile.To those who are more shocked by such dramatic

moments than by the burning alive of countless humanbeings, what can one say? Often one is at a loss. Butthere is something one can say and do; patiently, andtrying always to realize that they are suffering from afailure of imagination (which is what underlies mostfailures of compassion and of just indignation) andoften, also, from simple ignorance of the facts, one cankeep on presenting them with the evidence in the reasonable hope that eventually their imagination? and withit their intelligent responses, will awaken. For example,one can reiterate to such people the story by BernardWeinraub, New York Times correspondent, dated Saigon, Sept. 19 th:

The director and key staff of a major volunteer agency supported by the United States government has resigned in . . .protest against the Vietnamese war.At the same time, 45 teachers, agricultural specialists andsocial workers who are members of the agency have signed aletter to President Johnson that calls the war "an overwhelmingatrocity". . . . "We have seen enough to say that the only monuments to this war will be the dead, the maimed, the despairingand the forlorn", says the letter, signed by members of International Voluntary Services, a private group suppoted by the U.S.aid program, and which has 170 volunteers, more than any ofthe other relief groups in South Vietnam. One of the mosthighly respected agencies in the country, it has sought to helpthe Vietnamese at the village and hamlet level, with volunteersteaching English, training refugees, working on agriculturalprojects and aiding the war's widows and orphans. . . . DonLuce of East Calais, Vermont, the 33-year-old director of IVS. . .who has worked in Vietnam for 9 years, said slowly and intensely,"We need an end to this war. We're witnessing right nowthe destruction of Vietnamese family life, of its agricultureand transportation. We're seeing the development of cityslums ... I have a feeling that the changes needed aregreater than the person-to-person kind of thing IVS does . . .As individuals, we cannot become part of the destruction ofa people we love. We're leaving here because this is the onlyway to express our disagreement with the tragedy going onhere."

Don Ronk, of Arcata, Cal., leader of IVS in the DaNangarea, a former military policeman who has worked there fortwo years with pickpockets and juvenile delinquents, said:"This war is much, much more than the guns, bombs, andbattles. Not only do I speak against the dying and maimingof the body ... I speak also against the dying and maimingof those qualities separating man from beast. I believe thatmy protest is in the best interests of my Vietnamese friendsand is intended to say what they are largely unable to say:Stop this war. ... As much as I love these Vietnamese whohave gathered with me, as much as I desire to be here assome form of shelter and solace in these times of horror, asmuch as I realize their personal hurt if I must go, I mustweigh it against speaking out against the cause of so muchof their anguish and the anguish of all Vietnamese.Let those who are shocked by the desperate measures taken by men of good will in their attempts to

bring this war to an end ? whether by burning draft

SenatorYoungof Ohiohascondemned hat he calls the assumption y themilitaryof "an increasinglylarger role in formulatingnationalpolicy." The NewYorkTimescalls this the "mostalarming" spect of the Vietnamwar. Ifour representativesnCongress annotorwill notcontrol hemilitaryandits overbearingCommander-in-Chief,henwe must do itourselves,byan act of personal epresentation.18 The North American Review



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cards or blocking public buildings that house the bureaucratic machinery for directing the war traffic, or bybloodying file drawers ? let them examine the moralnature of their disapproval, and weigh it against thattestimony. Is this not a desperate situation, that callsfor desperate measures? Many an honest man and woman will find their viewpoints changing, their sense ofvalues being rectified, if they are presented with relevant juxtapositions of the facts. Failure of imagination is in part a failure to make connections, to lookat things not in unrelated compartments but as partsof a whole. How often E. M. Forster's words ring in

my mind when I am confronted by this failure in nice,decent, well-intentioned people ? 'Only connect 'One of the achievements, as I have said, of the weekof October 16/21, has been to confirm and strengthenthe spirit of war-resistance in the participants. (Thenext wave of draft card turnings-in is being preparedalready as I write. A New York theater is being rented for an evening of eyewitness accounts?and film?of the Pentagon affair. Local and regional actions of

many kinds are being organized.) Another has been togive further evidence to the politicians

?both hawksand doves ? of how widespread the opposition to thewar has become. The more intelligent of the Administration supporters, however unwillingly, and the op

portunists looking for the next move, are at last beginning to realize that though the active protesters arestill a small minority of the nation, they are of ?litequality. There have been indirect indications of thisrealization in various quarters. To the more intelligentand humane Senators and Representatives, those whoalready oppose the war, the assembly of the thousands of protesters inWashington can only have beenan encouragement; Senator Mansfield's statement, inwhich he deplored the Sit-in (on the basis of distortedaccounts of it, surely) notwithstanding. (I have evidence from at least 2 other Senators that they do findthe demonstrations an important encouragement totheir own stand.)To the many uncommitted, confused, but openminded citizens back home in the academic, professional,and residential communities to which the 100,000 returned to tell the tale truly and to persevere in theirdedicated activities, that week brought wonder at thedetermination of so many, a reconsideration of theirown inaction, and, to some, a resolve to join at least?for instance?the next peace vigil in their neighborhood. Thus, step by step, more people are being stirred out of their inertia. And after all, some of thosepresently most active were themselves inert not so longago. The attempt by an irresponsible press and by intemperate war-committed politicians to make the wholething 'look bad,' to cheapen it (as by references to 'theodor of marijuana' or by choosing to focus on the twoViet Cong flags?paraded by a close-knit group oftwelve persons ? out of hundreds of banners, among

which the Stars and Stripes predominated, carried atthe demonstration; or by talking of 'violence' withoutadmitting whose violence it was. . .) is being quietlycountered by the personal influence of the eyewitness

MARRIAGE(for our anniversary)

Elbows on the glassI watched till the wings tipped into the sun.Then I blinked you gone.After that last hard talklike work we'd doneyou leave me in a fit of calm,an ice-burn cool,easy in our distances.

Look, they are only miles.Measurable.

NO TRUCEEach of us wokeon a different morningand the world was upside downsky green grass bluea violent flame inching across the lawnout of the west

We got to work grunting and swearingblood gone to our headsshoving the balance backand more than ourselves

we've spent each otherno breath left no tricksThe sun not teasing licks at these handsthat dangle down the skyAnd ifwe never learn

to walk on it. . . .Rosellen Brown

ROSELLEN BROWN, from 'New Jork, has been living forthe past three years in lougaloo, Mississippi. Her work hasappeared previously in Poetry, Quarterly Review of Literature, Poetry Northwest, and other magazines.

es. Who can say whether lies or the truth will prevail.But I do think, judging from my own experience in arural area of Maine and from conversations in shopsand lunchcounters, bus stations and beauty parlors, inmany States in the last couple of years, that the 'common man'?and woman?is increasingly skeptical ofnews-media accounts and of politicians' speeches

(whether or not they are familiar with the term 'credibility gap'). And concomitantly they are readier tolisten to a view that condemns the war, especially whenthey see that the person expressing it is neither veryyoung nor noticeably eccentric in dress or manner. Yet

January, 1968 19



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these are the people whose sons and brothers andhusbands are in Vietnam or soon expect to be sentthere; they have quite personal reasons to be thoughtful about the war?but also to be defensive about it.If the underprivileged masses, with whom, alas, fewpeace activists come into much direct contact, will listen thoughtfully and often express their own disillusionment with the war, then surely the more privileged?the peripheral members of the middleclass intelligentsia with whom the activists do come in contact?are going to be quite widely affected, at least to thepoint of having some nagging thoughts to deal with,by the 'returning veterans' of the demonstrations?those past and those to come.

Something else was not precisely 'achieved' but unintentionally effectuated at the Pentagon, by the response of the Pentagon authorities, by their brutalityand by their lying about their brutality (e.g., the attempt by the Army to deny its use of tear gas and tosay that 'if it was used' it was by the demonstratorsthemselves?this in the face of thousands of witnesses,including, in this case, the press, who saw the soldiersthrow it ) I refer to the 'radicalizing' of many of theparticipants. By some, who deplore the war but are inno way politically revolutionary, this will be, or is being, looked on with mixed feelings, perhaps with somefear. Others will rejoice. But whether it is, in the longview, a good or a bad thing, it certainly has happened:i.e., many apolitical people in the Peace Movement,confronted more closely than ever before with a massive concrete manifestation of Authority, found them

selves entertaining for the first time the idea that perhaps to stop the war would not be enough; that evenif this war is stopped, perhaps we cannot stop otherwars unless we radically change a political and economic system that promotes war.The Peace Movement has never been composed exclusively of pacifists, in fact complete pacifists constitute a small minority within it; but a belief in non-violence as the way in which to work for peace has nevertheless permeated those sections of the movementwhich feel there are certain wars in which they wouldfight. And this belief prevailed at the Pentagon in theface of long hours of provocation. One of the mostagonizing questions in the minds of many of us nowis whether, if the war goes on and on, (and meanwhile social injustice continues in our ghettos and ruralslums) we will continue to find the spiritual strength toadhere, in spirit and action, to the non-violence we believe is right, the positive peace-action that refuses tolet violence make us violent. 'Hope deferred maketh theheart sick.' For the moment there is hope: and it liesin the young, who in this generation are showing anunparalleled revulsion from methods of force and bruteauthority that other generations have taken for granted.

We older ones?who have already seen how 'wars toend war' and 'wars for freedom' lead to more war andless freedom, from morass to morass ? (as Walter

Lippman remarked in Newsweek, Nov. 6)?mustback them to the hilt. The patience of the young maynot be endless. May they not be tried too long

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