"There are those who would always rather be Red than dead, who do not mind seeing small nations gobbled up. They would almost rather be anything but responsible. What do they know, these bearded oafs who listen to the strumming of lugubrious guitars? To be loved is not the end of greatness."--Dr. George R. Davis, in a sermon Oct. 22 at a church service attended by President Johnson.

Under Siege

As night fell Saturday, the Pentagon looked like a citadel under siege. A yellow fog of smoke and tear gas hung stagnant over the grounds. Soldiers marching in front of the main entrance threw huge, ugly shadows on the thick concrete walls. Across the parking lot reserved for top military brass, down the steps, and sloping out over the rolling wall, demonstrators spilled. Some of them were warming themselves in front of bonfires made with ripped-up placards and sticks. A long line of buses with their headlamps glowing strung-out along the access roads. The air was chilly but still evening-calm, and a heavy yellow moon hung over the whole scene.

The day had begun on the Washington side of the river. Tens of thousands of people clung to the sides of the Reflecting Pool, which stretches between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. They overflowed beyond the big shade trees and sat on the banks on the Constitution Avenue side. David Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, was standing in front of a rostrum across the street from the scolding stare of Abraham Lincoln. Dellinger was saying, "Our-voices will be heard and our bodies will be heeded."

Each speaker who followed Dellinger was trying to out-epithet the others. Norman Mailer '43 had called Lyndon Johnson "an imbecile" the day before. Now John Wilson of SNCC was calling Lyndon Johnson a "criminal" and "a fool." And Dr. Benjamin Spock chipped in: "The enemy, we believe in all sincerity, is Lyndon Johnson."

As the speeches droned on for two hours, as Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary (remember?) soured a few songs, as the crowd became more and more restless, a strange thing happened. It was becoming evident that here around the Reflecting Pool people were celebrating the last sacrament of an irrelevant form of protest. The crowd was itching to get going, to bury the numbers game once and for all, to do something hard and steely and significant this time.

The Secretary of Defense, Robert Strange McNamara, The New York Times Magazine reports, "relaxes well, is a provocative conversationalist because of his wide interests and has the grace and erudition to enterain the lady next to him at the dinner table with a recitation of Yeats."

Fifty thousand demonstrators (if I may estimate) walked slowly, stop-and-go, across Memorial Bridge, up the road toward John F. Kennedy's grave in Arlington Cemetery, then turned left and marched down Boundary Channel Drive past scores of little white yachts tied up in Boundary Channel.

And there they were, right in front of the 24-year-old fortress with three times the floor space of the Empire State Building where the Defense Department lives and where the sportcoated Secretary of Defense was watching them out of his window.

Nazis

Violence had begun at the Reflecting Pool. Two young men in wind-breaker jackets relieved the boredom by rushing British Labor leader Clive Jenkins, who was speaking, and smashing him and the rostrum and all the microphones down to the ground. No one was hurt, and the two men, later identified as members of the American Nazi Party (Arlington, Va.), were wrestled away by marshals as the Nazis yelled, "Commies, commies, Vietcong commies," into a microphone obligingly held by a radio station technician.

The Nazis were in front of the entrance to the Pentagon, too, at least until a whole horde of demonstrators, sick of their taunts, set upon ten of them and chased them over roads and fences and parking lots, beating them over the head with the Nazis' own picket signs.

MP (to reporter): "Where's your press pass?"

Reporter (pointing to lapel): "Right here."

MP (quite angry at seeing a small paper flower just above the badge): "Take off that damn flower."