The war dominated everything. And the October action began with massive protests against the war--draft-card turn-ins that were supposed to symbolize a new direction for the anti-war movement, "from dissent to resistence."

On October 16, turn-ins were organized across the country to begin an anti-war, anti-draft week that would culminate in a march on the Pentagon "to confront the warmakers." In Boston, 237 men, including 23 Harvard students, burned or turned in their cards. In New York, Baton Rogue, and San Francisco the scene was the same. In Oakland, California, all through the week, anti-war demonstrators trying to march on the induction center there battled police, and the New York Times showed you the blood on the front page.

These Octobrists were the conscience of the movement that would develop during the year. On Friday, October 20, they presented their 984 cards to the Justice Department. Since then, a Selective Service memorandum has called for them to be treated as delinquents, and many are facing five-year jail terms.

If there was one day, a single day that can be described as a turning point in the move toward resistence, it was Saturday. The place (Simon James's "salient characteristic") was the Pentagon.

"For the first time in my life, I was standing on one side and my government was standing on the other," said one participant. "We finally found out what it was like to be Vietcong," said another. Soldiers were coming at you with gas masks on and sheathed bayonets drawn. Tear gas canisters exploded, and people were being dragged off for "transgressing a police line," like Norman Mailer did.

At the Pentagon, hundreds of U.S. Marshals and thousands of troops faced 40,000 demonstrators. That was all it was--a raw, bitter confrontation. Two lines facing each other, looking at each other. There were sudden rushes into the line of troops drawn around the building--almost a giant game of capture the flag. In the end 600 were arrested.

And there was blood, too. The repression came, and for the first time in their lives, middle-class college students were clubbed and gassed by police and soldiers. It was Keniston's "confrontation with evil," the thing that radicalizes you. That night, a few thousand sat on the steps of the Pentagon with troops smashing them with rifle butts, but no one reported it.

In the morning, they came home to school to tell their friends about it. At a rally in the Yard, once one-time cool-liberals were talking in hot-radical tones about what had happened, and the word brought a reaction.

The first place it happened was Princeton, an unlikely place. Amory Blaine would have been shocked to see 31 students arrested for blocking the entrance to a government-sponsored military research center on the university's campus--the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA). IDA would later become a major university complicity issue at the University of Chicago and at Columbia.

The people who go to Princeton today are quite different from those who went there five years ago. And this situation is the same at other "pace-setting" schools. A few years ago, a new dean of admissions at Princeton changed the school's public-to-private school graduate ratio from 40-60 to 60-40. The new radicals there call themselves "Dunham's Children" after the admissions dean. Upperclassmen were calling them "lunchmeat"--a favorite Princeton expression. But the "lunchies" dominate Princeton now. And a tiny but active SDS chapter has been organizing sit-ins all year.

Princeton's effect on other campuses was strong. Just as Midwestern types had once adopted the button-down shirt and the rep tie from the Ivy League, they now began to adopt the sit-in as life style.

At Harvard the reaction to the Pentagon was the Dow sit-in. Three hundred students held a Dow recruiter named Frederick Leavitt inside Malinckrodt M-102 for seven hours, then let him go. As a result, 74 students were placed on probation and the Student-Faculty Advisory Council, a committee of the Faculty, was set up to look into recruiting and other things.

The October demonstrations opened things up. Students began to look into what their universities were doing. They began to complain and criticize. Something was building.

In Cambridge, a "failure of the system" sort of radicalizing event happened when a referendum on the war was soundly defeated. To quite a few hard-working students, including many that Keniston had interviewed months before, it was a stunning blow. The "channels" that liberals had talked about were turning out to be ineffective channels.

V.