New York at War (48 page)

A new generation coming to maturity—the Duck and Cover generation—began to find its voice in these demonstrations in New York’s streets and parks. Inspired by the emerging Southern civil rights movement and exhilarated by the decline of McCarthyism, young New Yorkers sang “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” and courted arrest in City Hall Park. For some, the schoolroom drills began a process of radicalization that would continue to build. Looking back, Robert K. Musil, leader of Physicians for Social Responsibility, found the roots of a new decade in the schoolhouse drills: “The styles and explosions of the 1960s were born in those dank, subterranean highschool corridors near the boiler room where we decided that our elders were indeed unreliable.” Duck and Cover veterans from New York City would go on to populate the leadership ranks of the New Left: Mario Savio from Queens became the face and voice of the student free speech movement at Berkeley, Todd Gitlin from the Bronx would be a president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and an antiwar activist, and Mickey Melendez from Spanish Harlem would cofound the militant Puerto Rican organization the Young Lords.
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A new youth counterculture, spilling out from Greenwich Village coffeehouses into open-air performances in Washington Square, posited the bomb as a symbol of everything wrong and insane in American society. “People were building bomb shelters everywhere,” folksinger John Cohen later recalled. “ . . . Here we were in the middle of Greenwich Village like a little pus pimple in the middle of this huge society, saying . . . I’m not going to live my life that way.” Yet despite the protests emanating from New York’s bohemian quarter, the confrontations between President Kennedy and Russian Premier Khrushchev—over Berlin in 1961, over Cuban missiles in 1962—meant that the Cold War might grow very hot at any moment. “The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Cohen remembered, “ . . . the general feeling was the world was going to end or something.” Walking into the Gaslight Café on Mac-Dougal Street, Cohen saw his young friend Bob Dylan up on stage, singing to a small audience. Cohen joined Dylan to sing the country standard, “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone.” All the while Cohen was thinking, “
who’s
going to miss us when we’re gone? We’re all [going to be] gone! . . . What the hell is this?” Dylan was soon singing one of his own songs, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” in the Village coffeehouses, an anthem that defied civil defense preparations and embodied the disobedience now linking venerable pacifists, middle-class families, and a growing body of students throughout the country.
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The songs, the street rallies, and the acts of civil disobedience would soon have a new focal point, a country nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia, a place that would soon fill the living rooms of New Yorkers with bloody images and their streets with angry crowds.

On August 8, 1964, a small midtown demonstration foreshadowed the future in ways no New Yorker could predict or realize. Some sixty men and women, mostly of college age, gathered in Duffy Square, at Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street, with placards reading “U.S. Troops Out of Vietnam.” They were led by a student organization called the May 2 Movement, and they included members of small leftist groups active on local campuses, mostly Trotskyist and Maoist, including Youth Against War and Fascism and the New York Spartacist Committee. Their chants that day drew connections between the civil rights movement and opposition to American foreign policy. Early August 1964 was the tense climax of Freedom Summer; three hundred Northern students had flocked to Mississippi to help blacks register to vote. Four days earlier, the bodies of white New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and black Mississippian James Chaney had been unearthed near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where local Klansmen had buried the three Congress of Racial Equality activists after murdering them. Three weeks earlier, Harlem had exploded in four days of rioting after a white policeman fatally shot a black teenager. “Protest Police Brutality—Here and in Vietnam,” and “Send Troops to Mississippi—Not Vietnam,” the Duffy Square demonstrators chanted.
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Citing a ban on political demonstrations in midtown, put into effect after a 1962 antinuclear testing rally, Captain John McAllister of the Sixteenth Precinct ordered the Duffy Square protesters to disperse. Many refused. As the group chanted “Fascist Cops! Fascist Cops!” mounted policemen and patrolmen on foot charged into them with nightsticks swinging. A reporter watched as a young woman “went at a patrolman with both fists,” and as “a young man in a green T-shirt made himself as stiff as a board and was loaded into a police car.” Seventeen were taken to the precinct house by patrol car and taxicab. As the arrestees’ friends marched and chanted in a circle outside the precinct on Forty-Seventh Street, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés living in adjoining tenements leaned out their windows, jeered, and poured water on them. As the Cold War grew hot again in a remote region of Southeast Asia, the inhabitants of the nation’s most cosmopolitan city once more brought the conflicting passions and ideologies of a foreign war into their own streets.
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On August 7, the day before the Duffy Square protest, Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon Johnson authority to commit American forces against Communist North Vietnam and Communist guerillas fighting the South Vietnamese government. But Vietnam had already gained the attention of New York pacifists a year earlier, when, on the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, two young Catholic Workers, Thomas Cornell and Christopher Kearns, picketed the residence of South Vietnam’s permanent observer to the United Nations, Mrs. Tran Van Chuong, in the East Sixties. South Vietnam’s despotic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, himself a Catholic, had sparked international uproar and embarrassed his ally, President Kennedy, by launching a violent persecution of his nation’s Buddhist majority. “We demand an end to U.S. military support of Diem’s government,” Cornell’s and Kearns’s picket signs read. The strategic advantage of demonstrating in the nation’s media capital became clear when ABC News sent a television crew to cover and broadcast a rally by the two men and 250 supporters on the tenth day of their protest.
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Religious pacifists and student members of an emerging New Left were fashioning the tactics of an antiwar movement before most Americans were even paying attention to developments in Indochina. By the late summer and fall of 1964, in fact, a coalition of groups and individuals was coming together in opposition to Johnson’s accelerating intervention in Vietnam. Demonstrators brought the energy of the nuclear disarmament and anti–civil defense movements to a new cause. At rallies in Washington Square Park, a thousand New Yorkers listened to the octogenarian socialist leader Norman Thomas and the septuagenarians A. Philip Randolph and A. J. Muste—three men who, between them, had given over 150 years of work for progressive change—denounce the war. Muste insisted on the need “to keep the issue of Vietnam before the public, and before the Administration.”
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More than altruism propelled the new protest movement. By 1965 and 1966, Mickey Melendez and other recent high school graduates faced a new and dangerous world. “Adulthood had arrived, and along with it, the war . . . ,” Melendez remembered. “The draft was breathing down hard on all our backs.” Pals from the South Bronx neighborhood where he now lived enlisted or were drafted into the marines, the air force, and the army. “My neighbor, Pedro, came back in a body bag with his tags on his big toe. . . . It just didn’t make sense. Was there any reason for him to die? The news on the TV, the radio, or the papers did not provide a good answer to that question.” Over the course of a decade, thousands of New Yorkers would serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. As was true nationally, their ranks were disproportionately filled with the poor, the undereducated, and men and boys of color, as deferments shielded most college students from the draft. By the time the war was over, 1,741 New Yorkers had been killed in Southeast Asia. To Melendez’s friends, “War was not popular. Neither was defeat.” Such ambivalence—a mix of fear, grief, anger, patriotism, and unwillingness to see the United States lose the conflict—was more widespread than one might glean from the public protests and media coverage that sought neatly to split Americans into antiwar and pro-war camps.
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Antiwar activists used New York as an organizational center and proving ground during the Vietnam War. Faces of Vietnamese children stared out from photographs on the walls of New York subway stations in 1965, skin twisted and mutilated by napalm. The posters, pasted there by SDS members, were only one sign of the ways in which the distant war was coming home to New Yorkers. With LBJ’s bombing of North Vietnam in February, and with over two hundred thousand American troops now on the ground in South Vietnam, the antiwar movement gained momentum and headlines. Bearing nonviolent witness in the Gandhian tradition linked several national organizations that made 5 Beekman Street, across Park Row from City Hall Park, their official home. The building housed the offices of A. J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, Bayard Rustin and David Dellinger of the War Resisters League, the Catholic Peace Fellowship, the Committee for Nonviolent Action, and the pacifist magazine
Liberation
, all of which cooperated to oppose the war.
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Five Beekman also harbored the new Fifth Avenue Peace Parade Committee, run by Norma Becker, a tireless schoolteacher and Freedom Summer veteran. She oversaw an eager crew of high school and college volunteers who staffed phones, stuffed envelopes, and mimeographed leaflets at all hours of the day and night. Becker’s Charles Street apartment became the arena for some of the national movement’s most heated bull sessions. Over the next few years, New York stalwarts like Becker, Dellinger, David McReynolds of the War Resisters League, Cora Weiss of Women Strike for Peace, Linda Dannenberg of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and others would provide a coordinating organizational backbone for the antiwar movement. They were not alone; activists from other parts of the country also played key roles in the “Mobe,” the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (1967) and its successor umbrella organizations that sought to keep a precariously diverse national movement together. But Dellinger, Becker, and Weiss were ubiquitous in the Mobe’s strategic planning and operations. As the setting for marches and confrontations shifted among Washington, Berkeley, Oakland, Chicago, and campuses nationwide, New Yorkers—with their seasoning in progressive organizations, their willingness to fund liberal causes, their ability to mobilize vast numbers and individual celebrities, their street smarts and media awareness, not to mention their stubbornness and chutzpah—played pivotal roles in the movement’s genesis and survival.

Across the city, as across the entire country, Vietnam aroused members of the swelling postwar baby boom generation, on campuses where most males were exempt from the draft, and in neighborhoods where the body bags were beginning to return. Pondering the linkages they perceived between capitalism, imperialism, and institutionalized racism, students joined New Left organizations like SDS, now a national entity whose headquarters had moved from New York to Chicago in 1965, partly to cut free from its parent organization, the more moderate League for Industrial Democracy. In a meeting in New York in December 1964, SDS leaders had begun organizing the first mass antiwar march on Washington for Easter 1965. Off the campuses, in poorer neighborhoods, America’s Asian war was also becoming a debatable issue. To at least some in Spanish Harlem and the South Bronx, including Mickey Melendez, “the ‘enemy’ looked too much like us—Puerto Ricans. American troops were destroying shantytowns in a remote country, which had an eerily similar appearance to the tropical country of our fathers.”
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On April 15, 1967, in the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock and Martin Luther King Jr. led at least one hundred thousand demonstrators—perhaps as many as four hundred thousand—from Central Park across Fifty-Ninth and Forty-Seventh Streets to a rally outside the United Nations. It was, to date, the largest antiwar demonstration in American history. In addition to busloads of marchers from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago, the city’s disparate constituencies flowed into the massive crowd. The middle-class professional women and housewives of Women Strike for Peace, some of them participants in the anti–civil defense actions of 1960 and 1961, joined the throng. A civil rights movement veteran named Abbie Hoffman helped lead a motley contingent from the East Village, which had burst forth as the East Coast’s mecca for hippies and cultural rebels. Hoffman sauntered uptown amid “[Allen] Ginsberg’s bells and chants, The Bread and Puppet Theater group, gaily dressed and stoned, a Yellow Submarine, and a lot of people who looked like they had posed for the Sergeant Pepper album cover.” “No Vietcong Ever Called Me Nigger,” asserted signs carried by protesters from Harlem. Many marchers chanted, “Hell no, we won’t go,” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Some went further than demanding an end to bloodshed and actively advocated the cause against which the United States was fighting in Vietnam. Marching with several hundred fellow Columbia students, Mark Rudd, a freshman from the New Jersey suburbs, observed militants carrying the red, blue, and gold Vietcong flag. “I felt a secret thrill: Here were people declaring in public what I only dared to say in private.” At the same time, Rudd “looked up to see a group of nuns waving at us from a second-floor balcony of their fancy Upper East Side convent. Everyone in New York seemed to be against the war.”
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