The Morning After

Unarmed people in our lines were being bayoneted and kicked into unconsciousness, then dragged away. We, like the Jews, had come nonresisting into this isolated house of death, and we sat in the dark, at the mercy of robots before the gas chambers waiting for the proverbial bar of soap.

Such, in the Stygian view of a girl correspondent for the underground newspaper Washington Free Press, was the scene before the Pentagon last week. Another rumor that passed around as quickly as a marijuana joint at a pot party had it that two antiwar marchers had been dragged into the Pentagon and summarily executed.

With no assist from the psychedelic sector, the Pentagon and environs last week looked nightmarish indeed. Workers had to use steam to scrub the steps and walls leading to the entrance of the Mall--and even that failed to erase the graffiti that demonstrators had smeared on with ineradicable black plastic paint. Some of the protesters--who numbered 30,000 to 35,000 according to a Naval Air Intelligence count--left more personal souvenirs on the Mall. "You should see what we found out there," said one worker. "Nothing but bras and panties. You never saw so many." The only damage to the Pentagon was three broken windows--two shattered by rocks and one by a wine bottle (French, white, vintage '64).

Distorting Dissent. The cleanup bill came to $12,000, but that was only a pittance. In all, the demonstrations cost $1,078,500. The Pentagon spent $149,000 to airlift military policemen and paratroops to Washington, the Justice Department $190,000 in overtime for U.S. marshals, the D.C. government $176,000 in overtime for policemen and another $5,000 for those who ran the workhouse at Occoquan.

Of the 684 who were arrested and taken to the workhouse, in the rolling Virginia hills, all but a few dozen were quickly released with suspended sentences. Novelist Norman Mailer was fined $50 and sentenced to 30 days with 25 suspended, then freed pending an appeal. There were 47 injuries, including 24 to demonstrators; notwithstanding the rumors of bayonetings and executions, the most serious casualty was a demonstrator's broken arm.

The prospect is for more and more massive demonstrations against the war. However, if they merely replay the romantic and potentially tragic script of the march on the Pentagon, they will impair not only the cause they hope to represent, but the cherished American tradition of dissent as well. "The whole thing ended so meanly," Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz said almost sadly before the Yale Political Union. "There must be a great many people who feel they were discredited by a few who distorted dissent into obscenity."

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