The Dilemma of Dissent

THE PEOPLE

At opposite ends of the American continent last week, dissenters were on the march. In New York, they turned up 125,000 strong, from points as disparate as Detroit, Mich., and Dedham, Mass.--most of them young, many of them carrying posters, all of them out for a spring housecleaning of their passions. In San Francisco, 55,000 gathered from points as distant as Coronado, Calif., and Coos Bay, Ore. The avowed aim of the "Spring Mobilization to End the War in Viet Nam" was to demonstrate to President Johnson and the world the depth of feeling in the U.S. against the conflict. The end result --aside from probably delighting Hanoi's Ho Chi Minh--was to demonstrate that Americans in the springtime like to have fun. They did.

The gargantuan "demo" was as peaceful as its pacificist philosphy, as colorful as the kooky costumes and painted faces of its psychedelic "pot left" participants, and about as damaging to the U.S. image throughout the world as a blow from the daffodils and roses that the marchers carried in gaudy abundance. In an emotional speech before the League of Jewish Women in Atlanta last week, Vice President Humphrey--just back from two weeks in Europe--quoted Pope Paul VI as telling him: "America's moral power is being eroded by the manner in which your country is being interpreted in the eyes of the world." With tears welling in his own eyes, the Vice President said: "America needs to tell the world of the lives it is saving. We need to be known as a nation of peacemakers, not just peace marchers."

After last weekend's peace marches, neither the Pope nor the Vice President need worry about American moral power. The demonstration proved once again the viability of dissent within a free society and, though it was attempting to do nothing of the kind, spoke eloquently for what the U.S. is trying to defend in South Viet Nam--namely, the right to speak out.

"Draft Beer, Not Boys." As the demonstration began, a confluence of contrasting groups flowed into the muddy Sheep Meadow of Manhattan's Central Park: anarchists under black flags; Vassar girls proving that they are, too, socially conscious; boys wearing beads and old Army jackets; girls in ponchos and scrapes, some with babies on their shoulders; Columbia University scholars in caps and gowns. On Central Park West, a parked bus bore the proud sign: "Even Smith"--meaning that college, too, was represented. There were Vietniks and Peaceniks, Trotskyites and potskyites, a contingent of 24 Sioux Indians from South Dakota and a band of Iroquois led by one Mad Bear Anderson. When a loudspeaker demanded that the Indians assemble at Truck No. 3 for the 30-block march to the United Nations, hundreds of New Yorkers looked for the truck to get a glimpse of a real live Indian.

Members of some 125 antiwar groups --from the moderate Women Strike for Peace to the "New Left" Students for a Democratic Society and the "Maoist" Progressive Labor Party--distributed literature and sold buttons. "Draft beer, not boys," exclaimed one button in wavy script; "Peace with Beatlespower is Funlove for life," proclaimed a poster that owed more to Lennon than Lenin.

A yellow papier-mache submarine cruised through the crowd, symbol of the psychedelic set's desire for escape. Angry-looking young Negroes from CORE and S.N.C.C. paced through the meadow carrying signs that read "I Don't Give a Damn for Uncle Sam" and "No Viet Cong Ever Called Me Nigger."

At one end of the Sheep Meadow, a group of young men burned their draft cards, the fumes of the burning paper mixing with the reek of incense and the throb of drums to produce a near-pagan sense of ritual. In the wake of a circuit court decision last week that seemed to condone draft-card burning, no cops moved in on the incendiaries. As police helicopters droned overhead and 3,000 cops watched calmly, the crowd's attention was directed to the entertainers in the meadow. A Greenwich Village group of puppeteers called the Angry Arts Theatre enthralled marchers with a performance of The King's Story, in which a Great Warrior wipes out The Red Man, The Dragon, The Priest, The King and the People, only to be killed by Death. "And that's the end of the King's story," said the man who played Death.

"Why?" "Because." Though one Bronx boy had booby-trapped several posters advertising the Saturday march, injuring a youngster who pulled one of them down, there was little subsequent violence. Police kept members of right-wing groups, including the Peter Fechter Brigade (named for a Berlin Wall victim), from mixing with the marchers.

En route to the United Nations, a handful of anti-antiwar demonstrators managed to pelt the peace parade with eggs. New York police on horseback--in contrast with the "Cossack" image so many Old Leftists apply to them--kept the countermarchers from breaking up the parade.

The nonideological, antipolemical nature of the march was best demonstrated by the response of the marching crowd to New Left cheerleaders:

Cheerleader: What do we want?

Crowd: Peace!

Cheerleader: When?

Crowd: Now!

Cheerleader: Why?

Crowd: Dead silence, followed by a shrill female "Because!"

Reneging on the Vow. At the United Nations, the carnival atmosphere dissipated. As a chilly wind whipped off the East River, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched across First Avenue to deliver a statement accusing the U.S. of violating the world organization's Charter to U.N. Under Secretary Ralph Bunche. "I saw you crossing the street," said Bunche in greeting King. "It was a shorter walk than we had in Selma, Martin."

Bunche's remark echoed the concern that many Americans felt in seeing King diverting his attention from the civil rights movement to the antiwar campaign. In a speech two weeks ago, he called the U.S. "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" and com pared its use of new weapons in Viet Nam to Nazi medical experiments. Bunche and the N.A.A.C.P. had already criticized King's shift as a "serious tactical mistake." The Urban League's Whitney Young warned that "limited resources and personnel should not be diverted into other channels."

Bayard Rustin, who organized the successful March on Washington, voiced a disappointment felt by many Negroes. "There is not going to be a tremendous rush of Negroes into the peace movement," said Rustin. In fact, many Negroes have found service in Viet Nam valuable in proving their courage--a quantity whose fierce abundance has never before been tapped in American armed combat quite so effectively.

Long the nation's most respected advocate of Negro advancement, King--a Nobel Peace Prizewinner--had held himself aloof from such demagogic "Black Power" advocates as S.N.C.C.'s Stokely Carmichael and CORE's Floyd McKissick. Indeed, King once vowed never to stand on the same platform with Carmichael as long as he spouted an anti-white line. By joining the Spring Mobilization, King reneged on that vow --and possibly on the entire cause of nonviolent Negro advancement.

At the U.N., King admitted that 10 million Americans at most "explicitly oppose the war," but said that they included many of "our deepest thinkers in the academic and intellectual communi ty." Building to a sonorous peroration, he cried: "Let us save our national honor--stop the bombing. Let us save American lives and Vietnamese lives-stop the bombing. Let us take a single instantaneous step to the peace table--stop the bombing. Let our voices ring out across the land to say the American people are not vainglorious conquerors --stop the bombing." Through it all ran the theme that America, "which initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world," is now "an arch counter-revolutionary nation."

The phrases that really rocked the U.N. Plaza were those of Stokely Carmichael: "There is a higher law than the law of Racist McNamara; there is a higher law than the law of the fool Dean Rusk; there is a higher law than the law of the buffoon Lyndon Baines Johnson." Though Stokely never defined it, his law was demagoguery, pitched to all authority haters.

For Love, Not War. Many left-wing Americans--including Senior Socialist Norman Thomas--refused to throw in with King, Carmichael & Co. Because the pitch of their protest made it seem that Hanoi was innocent of any aggressive role in the war, even the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy refused to take part, though SANE Co-Chairman Dr. Benjamin Spock spoke at the New York demonstration.

None of the non-participants challenged the right of dissent--simply the fact that this particular protest seemed based on a double standard that assumed Washington's guilt and Hanoi's innocence. Despite the marchers' pacific plea--"Make War on Poverty, Not People"--the sad fact of the "Spring Mobilization" was that it might only serve to prolong the war in Viet Nam. The ultimate accomplishment of the marchers who so gaily painted one another with psychedelic designs and marched down Madison Avenue in the cause of "love, not war," may be to encourage Hanoi in the belief that the country is divided and therefore to reject some future U.S. peace initiative. For those who oppose the Viet Nam war, that is the dilemma of dissent in the U.S. today.

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