March on the Pentagon

Starting in 1965 with tiny teach-ins that generated way more hostility than participation, the antiwar movement snowballed as information leaked about the horrors of cluster bombs, napalm, and Agent Orange. By the spring of 1967, hundreds of thousands of people were marching in the streets of New York and San Francisco.

An umbrella organization that covered 150 fractious groups of widely varying ideologies, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, declared October 21 the day to "Confront the War Makers" and march on the Pentagon. Several hundred thousand strong, the crowd stretched all they way from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument during speeches that urged the movement move "from protest to resistance." In late afternoon, they marched over the Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon.

"The mood was happy. I'd never seen so many hippies and lefties in one place," says Dave Lindorff, then a freshman at Wesleyan, now author of The Case For Impeachment. "When we got to the parking lots, everyone just broke for the Pentagon and started running. Being a track guy, I got to the front and we ran up these stone stairs to an elevated mall area where there were thousands of soldiers with bayonets. They fell back and blocked the doors to the building, so they were clearly under orders not to kill us. It was incredibly exhilarating, like we'd just stormed the Winter Palace in 1905. You could see the generals on top of the building looking worried."

Meanwhile in one of the parking lots, the Yippies had parked a flatbed truck with a sound system, and Ed Sanders of the Fugs was presiding over a highly stylized exorcism. Invoking every god from Anubis to Zoroaster as the crowd chanted "Out demons out! Out demons out!" Sanders commanded the Pentagon/pentagram at the center of the American empire to levitate by ten feet and Satan to leave its premises.

"We had also rented an airplane that was supposed to drop a bunch of daisies on the Pentagon, but it was never allowed to take off," says Sanders. "We still had most of the daisies, so after the exorcism, we distributed them to the crowd, went up to all these nervous young soldiers and put flowers in the barrels of their guns."

The subsequent photographs became iconic images of culture vs. counterculture, but it was only at night that the real confrontation occurred. "The soldiers started shuffling forward after dark, pushing us back to the federal marshals who were beating people with clubs and dragging them to the paddy wagons," says Lindorff. "The call went up to burn your draft card and a bunch of us did, just before the marshals got us. I ended up in a dormitory jail cell with about a hundred other guys who were serious revolutionaries. When I got out I was thinking I needed to read Leon Trotsky. I mailed the ashes of my draft card to my draft board, and they just sent me a new one. I burned it or tore it up about six times during the war."