They were in the belly of the beast. Marching on the Pentagon, control centre of the world’s most powerful fighting force, protesters against the Vietnam war were confronted by military police (MPs) with rifles pointed directly at their heads. Among the demonstrators was a long-haired man with a bulky sweater – and a bunch of flowers.
“All of a sudden, this hero put a flower in the barrel of the rifle pointed at his head, and everyone was disarmed on both sides,” participant Bill Zimmerman recalled. “The MPs had a ‘what the fuck is this?’ expression. Then I realised what he was doing and thought it was brilliant. He worked his way down the line and I saw him put seven, eight, maybe 10 flowers in rifle barrels. The crowd surged and I couldn’t see him any more.”
Zimmerman and fellow activists will be back in Washington this weekend to mark the 50th anniversary of the march on the Pentagon, a moment of flower power and turning point in the anti-war movement. More than 600 people – including novelist Norman Mailer – were arrested on 21 October 1967 for acts of civil disobedience, a day after a revolt against the draft led to the turning in of a thousand draft cards.
The audacious siege of US military headquarters was a milestone in the shift from pure protest to mass resistance. Half a million people would march in Washington in 1969. Four million high school and college students would go on strike in 1970 in response to the invasion of Cambodia. Zimmerman continued: “When you believe your government is committing crimes or failing to meet the needs of its people, you have to stand up and say something. If they still don’t listen, you have to do something more dramatic. The lesson of that day is with enough people you can overcome police power – resistance works. Today we Americans certainly have ample reason to protest and resist.”
The Pentagon protest was also a vivid demonstration of division in America. It would be followed by years of unrest including, in 1970, the deadly shooting of unarmed students at Kent State University in Ohio. The turmoil revealed a nation more deeply split than at any time since the civil war a century earlier, with protesters castigated as traitors, veterans returning to insults and the very meaning of patriotism suddenly uncertain. The rift has arguably never healed but rather become a scab picked at by the “culture wars”, Iraq war and now the presidency of Donald Trump.
Zimmerman, who features in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s critically praised PBS documentary series The Vietnam War, was 26 and working at Brooklyn College at the time. He remembers watching almost daily TV footage of US planes dropping bombs and napalm on villages, killing thousands of people as body bags came home. Yet supporters of war had slogans such as: “My country, right or wrong.”
‘It was clear we were being ignored’
Zimmerman took a bus to Washington, where the plan was to “hijack” an anti-war rally at the Lincoln Memorial and turn it into a march on the Pentagon. “We saw this as a potential turning point in the movement,” he said. “We had been protesting for three years and often felt frustrated at the lack of impact on policy. It was clear we were being ignored. Just as the war had escalated, we felt we had to escalate our protest.”
The rally crowd was more than 100,000 strong, with speakers including pacifist Dave Dellinger and paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock and musicians such as the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. The Washington Post reported: “At the Lincoln Memorial, the crowd that had gathered was in a football-afternoon mood as it lined the banks of the Reflecting Pool. There were hippies and housewives, veterans and aging pacifists, but the overwhelming majority were college or high-school aged students.”
About 50,000 people then marched across the river to the Pentagon: at one point a line of people stretched all the way from one to the other. Zimmerman said: “When I saw the number, I was elated. I realised we had succeeded in moving from protest to resistance. This was probably the first time anywhere in the world – except maybe with Gandhi in India – that 50,000 people were willing to commit civil disobedience.”
As Burns and Novick’s series has highlighted, the Vietnam war opened a cultural faultline that never went away. Zimmerman, who became a political consultant based in Los Angeles, added: “There was polarisation that occurred around Vietnam in which the right called the left traitors to the country; that’s a powerful word to use 20 years after world war two. We flipped early into calling our opponents fascists; that’s also a powerful word to use 20 years after world war two. It was not just a bitter disagreement. It became a battle between two sides that saw each other as unpatriotic and traitorous.”
The protesters arrived without a plan of what to do next. Some spoke of “levitating” the Pentagon and “exorcising” the evil spirits inside. More radical elements tore down temporary fencing as police and marshals, heavily outnumbered, scrambled to stop them. Zimmerman glimpsed protesters heading for an unguarded door on one side of the building. Marshals raced to block their access but 10 made it inside, only to be quickly seized and roughly thrown out. Teargas was fired and rifle butts used to beat back the crowd.
By late afternoon, the protesters had overcome two fences and pushed up to paratroopers with rifles and fixed bayonets, just 20 yards from the building. Zimmerman said: “We thought, maybe we can only go so far but, as we got closer, we saw they were younger than we were, like 19 or 20, probably with no training in crowd control. It occurred to us there was no way they had live ammunition: the government would not risk troops firing on American citizens. That emboldened us.”
Thousands of protesters sat on the grass or pavement directly in front of them. Zimmerman was in the front row and talked to the soldiers about the war and why he opposed it. “Some tried to maintain a military demeanour with stiff upper lips. There were hundreds of them so there was a lot of communication. In a few instances some talked back, gave counter-arguments, nodded and shrugged. They were confused and some of them may have been leaning against the war. I don’t think they were able to maintain military discipline; we were all contemporaries.”
A short distance away, MPs emerged from behind the paratroopers, holding rifles without bayonets at a 45-degree angle, pointing directly at the demonstrators’ heads. “We couldn’t be absolutely sure they didn’t have ammunition.” It was then the man with flowers came forward, a moment captured on film and newspaper front pages, although his identity is a mystery.
Evening turned into night and speakers used bullhorns and urged the paratroopers to switch sides. At about 9pm, Zimmerman recalls, one dropped his rifle, threw down his helmet and moved towards the crowd, but he was grabbed from behind and led away. Draft cards were burned on bonfires but, around midnight, the paratroopers seized the initiative and protesters were arrested or brutally beaten or chased away. By dawn, the crowd was down to several hundred.
‘Our country is far more polarised than it was in the 60s’
The rancour caused by the civil and political divisions over Vietnam continued through the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and the issue of nuclear proliferation, and reignited during the Iraq war under George W Bush. “The bitterness has escalated one step further in the presidency of Donald Trump.
“I think the country has become far more polarised than it was in the 1960s, in part because of the changes in news and communications. Back then there were three major networks and a newspaper in every major city. Nowadays when you have a division on the internet and cable news, there is no sense of common information that could be an anchor for reconciliation.”
Commemorative events include a vigil at the Pentagon on Friday featuring Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, a series of panel discussions on Saturday and a concluding gathering at the Vietnam Memorial that night.
Organiser John McAuliff of the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, was another participant in the march. The 75-year-old said: “People were singing, This Land is Your Land and America the Beautiful. In some ways I think of it as the last patriotic peace demonstration. People still felt that protest had an effect. The mainstream media treated it as a violent confrontation, as if it was anarchy – a totally different sense from being there.”
Yarrow, 79, said the march spurred him to mobilise artists for further political action. “I realised something evolving in this country for a long time had become a crisis of a moral sort. It was a war based on a tissue of lies. Music played a very important role in the anti-war movement in terms of conveying the message internalised in people’s hearts and reignited every time the song was sung.”
But he added: “The United States does not look at its mistakes and reflect on them and consider what did we do wrong and how can we make amends. We did not do it in Vietnam or Iraq or after we tortured prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. Where is the United States’ capacity for self-reflection and to learn from its mistakes? We are not doing what Germany did after the war.
“We are in perhaps the most dangerous time we have lived in in our lives in terms of the things we believe in. The divisions and the failure to address them led to the chasm we will have today. This might be the time to come to terms with it. Either we slide into the abyss or we look at the inequities that mean we could become tribalised in the extreme.”