policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
The major demonstrations of 1966 were held on March 26 when protests
took place in a dozen cities. The largest of the demonstrations,
22,000 strong, was in New York. The rest of 1966 was focused on
attempts to influence the President's Vietnam policy through the 1966
election. Those elections were a clear setback for the Democratic
Party which lost forty-seven House seats and three Senate rests to the
Republicans. However, the antiwar movement could not claim that the
rate reflected a repudiation of Johnson's Vietnam War policies. With
the evidence of failure to influence policy making, the antiwar movement
was in one of its recurring slumps.
In 1967 two sets of demonstrations, April 8-15 and October 19-21 were
the largest demonstrations yet organized and also marked a turning to
massive resistance to the war policies. Vast crowds assembled in New
York and San Francisco in April. The New York crowd was (very conservatively)
numbered at 100-125,030 by the police and the San
Francisco marchers filled the 65,000 Kezar Stadium. The antiwar
movement participants were angered by the government's dismissal of
the importance of the demonstrations and sought in the October fall
offensive to find new ways to com::iand the government's attention. The
resistance tactics that were agreed upon worked a change in the antiwar
movement.
Four major street actions occured in 1967 which were designed to
provoke viulence. Middle-class, middle-age participants played almost
no part in these activities which were organized entirely by young
people. The acceptance of planned violence was a symptom of the
failure of the antiwar movement of the young because it illustrated
how little had been achieved in three and a half years of demonstrating.
Between 50 and 75-thousand young people joined the Saturday
October 21 demonstrdtions in Washington. There was a traditional
rally at the Lincoln Memorial and then a march to the Pentagon across
Arlington Memorial Bridge. Once across the bridge the SUS people and
New York radicals broke from the police lines to the River Entrance
Plaza of the building and some twenty-five crashed into the Pentagon
itself. Through Saturday night and Sunday the demonstrators held
their positions in front of the Pentagon. Sunday night the demonstration
permit expired and the troops began to clear the Plaza.
The "storming of the Pentagon," as it is known in the movement legend,
marked the high water mark of the resistance stage of the antiwvar
movement. In fact, even as the young demonstrators surged toward the
Pentagon, thu movement itself was exhausted, frustrated, and
splintered. Groups like the Vietnam Moritorium Committee were able to
organize massive demonstrations in the fall of 1969 and in response to
the expansion of the war into Cambodia in 1970 and 1971. However, the
movement had spent itself. A sense of frustration and division
permeated the young people and fed their sense that the government
would respond to their call to withdraw from Vietnam. For a time in
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