Shakespeare's Birthday

Compared with the marches of yesteryear, the antiwar demonstrations that sizzled and, in most cases, fizzled from New York to San Francisco last week were downright duds. Only 400 marchers turned up under drizzly skies in Washington's Franklin Park, where their modest demeanor, punctuated with a scattering of McCarthy buttons, struck an odd contrast to the motley of the Pentagon marchers last October. Boston's 500 demonstrators scarcely disrupted the weekend traffic.

In the Sheep Meadow of Manhattan's Central Park, amid a sprinkling of Viet Cong flags, most of the crowd of 40,000 were subdued and conventionally dressed. The only trouble came when a phalanx of pro-war marchers showed up after a Loyalty Day parade farther downtown that included independence-minded Byelorussians, Third Avenue drunks and a Chinese-American chanting "Bomb Peiping!"

The pro-warriors, aflap with American flags and buttons that read "Kill a Commie for Christ," lashed into a crowd of peace marchers, crying "Queers! Creeps! You Commie bastards!" One little old lady particularly incensed them with a sign reading TRADE DEAN RUSK FOR THE PUEBLO. Police quickly broke up the melee, and Mayor John Lindsay added: "This country is big enough to draw a distinction between a wrongful Government policy and respect for those men being killed."

Moderates v. Immoderates. The President's political withdrawal and his attempts to negotiate with Hanoi had clearly damped the fires of the antiwar movement. Far fewer moderate Americans marched in last week's 16 "peace parades" (less than 75,000, v. 200,000 in 1967's Spring Mobilization drive); those few immoderates in the crowd made up in vitriol what they lacked in volume.

Some of the most vicious attacks were directed against the candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy (known scornfully to some marching leftists as "McKennedy"). "Even McCarthy talks about negotiations, enclaves and cadres," sneered Resistance Worker Steve Pailet, 23, of Boston. "Does the rapist negotiate with the person he's raped?"

In the San Francisco area, where last year almost 60,000 housewives, hippies, businessmen and beards marched, only 15,000 zealots turned out despite a blanket invitation to protest "against the war, racism, repression, poverty and the draft." Most of the 200,000 young Americans who took part in a day-long "student strike" by cutting classes the day before the marches just sat around on campuses, strumming guitars and singing folk songs. Remarked a San Francisco State professor: "Isn't it great that all these people came out to celebrate William Shakespeare's birthday?"*

* Who was officially christened April 26, 1564, and believed to have been born on April 23.

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