In his book Democracy from the Heart (1991), published almost a quarter-century after the March on the Pentagon, Gregory Nevala Calvert (1937–2005) looks back at some of the fierce debates that were then stirring behind the scenes—debates less clearly visible in accounts by contemporary writers like Norman Mailer or the correspondents of WIN Magazine. As Calvert tells it, a new “mood of militancy” had gripped Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), of which he was then national secretary; nonviolent resistance had begun to many to seem insufficient, a sellout, and plans were afoot to fight with police in the streets and “trash” downtown Washington, D.C. Counseled by David Dellinger and Barbara Deming—the latter in particular helping him to articulate a “non-heterosexual perspective” on the movement’s still-underacknowledged “violence-prone machismo”—he managed to hold the group together and kept it from splintering at least for a time.
Soon enough, the SDS did split—some female members forming feminist groups, the Weather Underground bombing the Capitol, the Pentagon, the State Department—and Calvert withdrew from his former role. He went on to work for the Illinois State Drug Rehabilitation program; edited and wrote for The Rag, an alternative newspaper; began a practice in Buddhist psychotherapy; and went back to school.
UNDER the banner of “From Protest to Resistance,” the Pentagon demonstration was scheduled for Saturday, October 21, 1967, the day after the end of the Oakland Stop-the-Draft-Week. I spent that week in non-stop meetings preparing for the largest, most militant demonstration against the war yet to take place. Plans for the demonstration included a rally at the Lincoln Memorial followed by a march across the Potomac to a second rally a short distance from the Pentagon and then a final march, by the most determined, right up to the Pentagon itself where civil disobedience was planned.
I was in a quandary about what to do. The new mood of militancy fed by the ghetto riots of the previous summer was creating the same dynamic on the East Coast that fueled the events in Oakland. I was approached by friends of several persuasions arguing that events in the black community demanded an equally militant response by white activists and specifically that the situation required that whites prove their ability and willingness to fight with the police in the street. The example of the Japanese Zengakuren’s tactics of using bamboo poles in street confrontation with police was held up for Americans to emulate. In the Washington, D.C., office of the Mobe, Jerry Rubin, former Berkeley activist who had been brought onto the Mobe staff at the urging of Dave Dellinger to be a project coordinator for the Pentagon action, argued that after the initial rally marchers should sit down en masse on the Washington freeways and provoke the disruption of the entire Eastern Seaboard’s transportation system. Several members of the “SDS house” in Washington, including Cathy Wilkerson and Tom Bell, wanted to organize a spray-painting spree targeting downtown buses. Students of former-Trotskyist-turned-anarchist Murray Bookchin who constituted the Up-Against-the-Wall-Motherfucker Lower Eastside of New York chapter of SDS wanted to trash downtown Washington in Zengakuren formations.
As I shuttled from New York to Washington, D.C., for Mobe meetings and negotiations with the GSA (the General Services Administration in charge of the capital’s five police forces), I had long talks with Dave Dellinger about the necessity of adhering to the principles of nonviolence if the Movement was to maintain its balance and humanity and not self-destruct in adventuristic violence. Dave Dellinger had become a beloved friend and perhaps my closest ally. In addition, he was a true teacher whose vision of revolutionary nonviolence seemed increasingly to me to provide the only framework which could guide the Movement in a sane direction. Although I came to have serious differences with Dave Dellinger about strategic initiatives in the following year, he was one of the most important influences on my life and thinking and I credit him with having helped me maintain my political equilibrium at a crucial moment.
Another practitioner of nonviolence and Movement theorist, Barbara Deming of the CNVA (Committee for Non-Violent Action), also provided me with important guidance at this critical juncture. During a long conversation from New York to the GSA headquarters in Washington, Barbara Deming asked me more significant and provocative questions than I was accustomed to in a month. This brilliant and humane woman raised precisely the kinds of psychological and political issues that I was asking myself. I did not have a male friend in the Movement with whom I could freely share my convictions on psycho-sexual-political questions. As a result of her prodding, I began to conceive of the idea of a teach-in to the troops at the Pentagon. In retrospect, I have wondered if what I shared with Barbara Deming for that short period of time was a non-heterosexual perspective on the issues of masculinity and manhood-proving, which made us both question the wave of violence-prone machismo threatening to overwhelm the Movement. Barbara Deming later presented some of her insights in a brilliant article, “On Revolution and Equilibrium,” which was the first major challenge in print to the politics of Black Power by a Movement radical. Her views were later elaborated in a book, Revolution and Equilibrium. Dismayed by the force of sexism and machismo in the Movement, Barbara Deming later became a radical separatist feminist.
Bolstered by my contacts with these advocates of radical nonviolence, I faced my comrades at the SDS House in Washington on the day before the demonstration and announced that if they were going to rampage through downtown D.C., I was going to join Dave Dellinger at the Pentagon and get arrested performing civil disobedience. They were appalled.
When I made it clear that I was absolutely serious, I became an instant outcast, but I remained firm and knew where I stood. I fully expected to be arrested the next day. If I was not able to prove to my friends that this was the only sane option, at least I wanted to make clear that in a choice between adventurism and moral protest, I had come down squarely on the side of nonviolence. At that point, I did not have a clear notion of how nonviolent action in such a situation could be infused with radical content and I was resigned to being liberal-baited out of the New Left. (The gay-baiting was already making my life quite painful in any case.)
That evening (Friday, October 20) while Berkeley radicals were celebrating the “victory” of mobile tactics and street fighting, I sat down for dinner with Dave Dellinger to discuss the morrow’s action. Also present was a man I had not known before, Arthur Kinoy, one of the brightest and most dynamic lawyers I ever met, who worked as legal counsel for the Mobe. For two hours the three of us pondered the situation with agonized concern over the splits that were happening in the Movement and might get dramatically worse the following day. I explained the painful dilemma I was in and my decision to stand with Dave Dellinger on the question of nonviolence even if it meant the end of my career in SDS. Kinoy painted a picture that dispelled my gloom. He presented two interrelated and compelling arguments for the correctness of our decision to go to the Pentagon and demonstrate nonviolently. First, he justified the target by arguing that the U.S. government had itself drawn the line at the Pentagon by stationing troops inside and also by putting all U.S. military on alert from the East Coast to Colorado. Secondly, he argued that nonviolence was appropriate because it was the only way to maintain the “unity of the Movement.” By the end of dinner, the three of us were elated. Arthur Kinoy and I went off to the SDS House where for two hours we argued the necessity of maintaining the unity of the Movement through nonviolence and the necessity of confronting the state at the Pentagon where it had chosen to demonstrate its military power.
We slowly won over the audience. Those who were not absolutely convinced by one or the other argument had been forced to think twice about the other alternatives. At no point did the argument degenerate into the false dichotomy between ineffective nonviolent moral protest and trashing (or other forms of violence or adventurism). Militant, radical nonviolence seemed to have won out over the impulse toward tactical adventurism and fighting with the police. There were, however, rumblings of discontent. My female companion of the preceding six months, Karen Ashley (later of the Weather Underground), would not speak to me because, she said, I had betrayed the Movement. I sensed that what I had really betrayed was her dream of being the partner of a revolutionary hero.
On Saturday, October 21, perhaps 50,000 people gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial to rally against the war. The crowd was restive. Just what did it mean to move “from protest to resistance”? For many it meant at least doing something more than easing their consciences by listening to speeches at rallies. The need “to put their bodies on the line,” that act of determination in the New Left which had always expressed its sense of ultimate existential commitment, was a driving force for many as they filed out from the first rally and marched across the Potomac to a second site where yet more speeches were to be heard. The official plan of the Mobe was to make the second rally an opportunity for those who wanted to do civil disobedience at the Pentagon to participate one last time with the bulk of the demonstrators before separating and continuing on.
As soon as we had crossed the Potomac and long before reaching the second rally site, Tom Bell grabbed me by the arm and yelled: “Let’s Go!” Almost before I knew it, I had become part of the new line of march which was half running towards the Pentagon. After about half a mile, we discovered that the GSA had carried out its threat to build a chain-link fence between the second rally site and the Pentagon in order to prevent demonstrators from reaching the building itself. The first canisters of tear gas were already being thrown by police. It was both exciting and somewhat frightening. When we reached the fence, Tom Bell, whose years as a full-back on the football team in high school and college had conditioned him well for physical confrontations, started to overwhelm the fence with sheer force. My many years as a farm boy had taught me much about both building and tearing down fences and I threw myself into the task.
With the fence now partially flattened, we ran straight for the Pentagon steps, avoiding the clouds of tear gas as best we could. Ahead of us was a group of adventuristic crazies, the “Revolutionary Contingent” from New York armed with long bamboo poles held upright and flying Viet Cong flags. We started up the Pentagon steps with hundreds of demonstrators now following behind us. The rank of marchers we now were part of included Marilyn Buck and Cathy Wilkerson.
When we emerged onto the great terrace between the top of the stairs and the actual doors of the Pentagon perhaps fifty yards away, we were facing a long line of federal marshals standing shoulder to shoulder with their billy clubs drawn. In front of us the Revolutionary Contingent was using its flag-topped bamboo poles to try to provoke a violent confrontation with the marshals. I was very afraid that the marshals would be provoked into firing tear gas into the crowd which, had it panicked and attempted to flee back down the steps, would almost certainly have trampled people in the surging mass that now poured up the stairs.
My instinctive reactions, formed by a childhood fraught with physical violence, were fear and the compelling need to get the situation under control in order to prevent bloodshed and violence. Tom Bell’s reactions, conditioned by years on the football team, were to rally the team and urge them to head for the doors of the Pentagon. Some far-sighted SDSers had commandeered a set of bullhorns and Tom Bell grabbed one of them. Now standing on a balustrade, waving and yelling through the bullhorn for the crowd to charge ahead to the doors, he was suddenly faced with a federal marshal, baton in the air and ready to strike. With the grace and strength of a true athlete, he grasped the baton in mid-air and slowly twisted it out of the marshal’s hand. The frightened cop slowly backed away and Tom Bell again began to urge the crowd to press ahead and break through the line. At the same time, the Revolutionary Contingent was still trying to provoke violence and a lone determined pacifist was trusting his throat against a cross-held billy club, taunting a marshal and trying to get arrested.
It was one of the tensest moments of my life. I was scared and I hated football, and Tom Bell appeared to me totally possessed by the heroic gridiron role he had played out for years. With fear in my guts and a certain sadness in my heart, I jumped up beside him, looked straight in his eyes, and told him with all the force I could summon to stop before someone got killed and to get down off the balustrade. “This is not a fucking football game,” I yelled. He faltered, began to deflate, and slowly got down. I took the bullhorn and began urging the crowd to sit down. Paul Millman, another SDSer with a bullhorn, did the same from another balustrade a hundred feet away. Slowly what could have been a violent confrontation became a mass nonviolent sit-in and teach-in to the hundreds of troops who had suddenly appeared from the doors of the Pentagon and replaced the federal marshals with three ranks of young soldiers. The forces of the state had indeed been called to act by using the Army to defend the Citadel of American Imperialism. It was a serious error on their part.
Suddenly the anti-war movement was faced with the same young men it had been urging to resist the draft and not to fight in Vietnam. We were nose-to-nose with the very soldiers to whom we wanted to talk. Instead of provoking them to bloodshed we were able to exercise the most powerful tool a radical nonviolent movement has—the appeal to the human heart—and we communicated a very clear and compelling message: “You don’t belong to the generals up there in their offices. You belong with us. This is their war, not yours or ours.” And then with a tremendous shout that rang over and over through the afternoon and evening air we chanted the most beautiful mantra I have ever heard: “Join Us! Join Us! Join Us!”
A few did—throw down their arms and join us.
Later that night, after being forced to change its wavering contingents of youthful soldiers several times, the generals in the Pentagon ordered a squad of fresh troops to drive a wedge into the seated crowd and to beat and arrest all who resisted. Some speakers took the bullhorn and begged for mercy, asking that they be allowed to be arrested peacefully. That seemed to me a psychological disaster, which threatened to turn a radical victory into a liberal defeat. It seemed to me that a radical nonviolent movement needed to be able to claim its victory and then call for a retreat. It did not need to deliver itself into the hands of the state.
I climbed up on the balustrade once again and gave a speech claiming a victory in which I sincerely believed. I addressed myself to the troops with the same message of solidarity that had been embodied in the appeal to “Join Us!” Then I said we should retreat—until we returned one day as part of a larger movement of the majority of the American people who would come to dismantle the Pentagon together with the structures of power and empire for which it stood. Most of the crowd responded with relief and simply walked away. A small minority, largely pacifists, stayed and got arrested. Later that night Jerry Rubin denounced the “SDS sell-out” of the demonstration. Later still he met with a man named Abbie Hoffman and together they made plans to join forces in the Youth International Party (a media-oriented radical group).
I left the Pentagon that night absolutely convinced radical nonviolence had worked and was the salvation of the Movement. Furthermore I was convinced that we had demonstrated that it was possible to confront the state nonviolently and effectively without falling into adventuristic tactics of street-fighting with police or trashing property. The event changed my life. It was another step in the completion of a new political gestalt that has guided me ever since. Others experienced the event in very different ways and drew very different conclusions than I did. There is no doubt in my mind that this moment in the history of the New Left, not just at the Pentagon but in the weeks preceding and following it across the country, marked the Great Divide in the Movement of the 1960s. I have recounted the story in personal, experiential terms because I believe no account of abstract ideas can explain the fate of the New Left. Only the lived experience of its participants holds the key to understanding its power and its self-destruction.
Part of what happened to me at the Pentagon was the deepening of an understanding that I found most clearly expressed years later when I read an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre, who said quite simply: “The real revolution will happen when we can all tell the truth about ourselves.”