"Do you expect to convince the people in the crowd who come to hear their candidate, Richard Nixon?" they asked.

I had tried to organize in the crowd at the Humphrey demonstration. I had seen the faces of the women with Humphrey buttons as we yelled "Bullllllll-shit! Bullllllll-shit!" and "Heil Hitler!" at everything Humphrey said. We knew we wouldn't convince them.

"Do you expect to convince the people who would see ten seconds of the demonstration on TV and then get Walter Cronkite's opinion of it?"

No.

"Well, nothing irritates working people more than a bunch of rich kids with long hair yelling in the streets. What in the hell are you doing?"

I HAD ALWAYS wanted to answer that we were changing the minds of the ruling class. Teddy looked really sad when we yelled "Sellllll-out!" at him too. The first time a Kennedy had been booed in Boston. Humphrey had even cut his prepared speech to shout back at us. He promised to "do everything in my power to end the war if you elect me President." I had been in the first row and I was sure that Humphrey had looked at me during the yelling and had seen my clenched fist and work shirt with rolled-up sleeves. I was sure that I could see that that day, Humphrey had turned against the war. I was wrong.

In fact, the whole idea of the Resistance was to change the mind of the ruling class. If enough middleclass kids went to jail, all of their parents would be so upset that they would never let the war continue. I'll still bet that when my parents talk to other parents, they defend what I did. It's really hard to call your own kid a "freak."

Some people in the Resistance really thought that we would be able to stop Hershey's machine. Hershey's real problem though was not how to find 500,000 men to sent to Vietnam but how to channel the other 11,000,000 into activities for the national interest. The Resistance strategy was bound to fail but a lot was learned about what not to do in the future.

All of the "political hassles" over the Nixon demonstration ended when Nixon himself, feeling that he would lose votes in direct proportion to the number of people he talked to, decided first to hold a press conference in a Boston hotel, then to hold a private reception in another hotel, and then finally to cancel the entire Boston trip. He was no fool.

By the way, who are you?"

"I'm Walrus."

WALRUS WAS ONE of the really important people from the old Resistance days. He was wearing a green corduroy cap and hiking boots. He had a moustache that grew straight down over both lips. He had cut his hair, which was why I didn't recognize him.

Walrus was sitting behind the wooden desk in the front of the office. Before the partitions had fallen, the garage had been divided into a front part, a mimeograph part, a phone part, and a storage part in the back. There was a winding stairway that led to the basement, the scene of all important group meetings.

The desk was the only part of the office that was still in the same position. Walrus had his feet propped up on it. There was one partition remaining behind him. On it, pages were scotch-taped from movement newspapers that looked like posters. One was red with white letters: "Some people talk about the weather. Not us." It had the silhouettes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

"Where's that from?"