March on the Pentagon

Some of America's greatest writers and intellectuals were also arrested that day: Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer (who wrote Armies of the Night about the demonstration) and Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist. "It's always an annoyance [to get arrested]," says Chomsky. "There were many such occasions. And even in something so minor as a few days in detention or a cell, it's a shock to realize what it is like to have no choices, to be under the complete control of an arbitrary outside authority. But protests are important if properly carried out, and if they lead to arrest, that can be useful too. Civil disobedience is not a principle in my view, but a tactic -- a good one if it leads others to take steps beyond what they had been willing to contemplate before. And that's often happened."

"The war went on for another seven years, so I'm not sure what good the demonstraton did," says Sanders. "We know now that Nixon was thinking of dropping nuclear bombs on North Vietnam but he was afraid of causing even more domestic disorder. We got some momentum going for the bigger demonstrations that scared him in '69 and '70. That was something. Bob Kaufman, the New Orleans poet, has a book titled Does the Secret Mind Whisper? The genius of the Pentagon exorcism is that we really did hear what the secret mind was whispering, and it was evil. Vietnam wasn't World War 2. It was totally unjust, and we tried to stop it with an act of non-violent rebellion in the spirit of Martin Luther King.

"Ultimately we were trying to relieve suffering by building a less competitive society. The big corporations hate that idea, and they're willing to drop a lot of napalm to stop it. But it'll come back. I still have friends from that era who are waiting for their anarcho-syndicalist free love zone. I won't live to see it, but here's what I think: If the whole universe can explode from a point that's smaller than the eye of mayfly, anything is possible, including a more egalitarian society."