Posted 2006-06-05
By October of 1965, I could watch the opposition to the war in Vietnam forming up outside my bedroom window. Nearly a thousand American troops had already died in the faraway fighting, which looked so close on our TV screens every night, and upward of a hundred and forty thousand—drafted inner-city blacks and down-home white country boys, by the look of them—were there, without notable result. A month later, my wife, Carol, and I joined friends and strangers aboard a bus that took us in a caravan to Washington, where we became part of twenty-five thousand antiwar demonstrators outside the White House and then over on the lawns sloping up toward the Capitol, where we cheered speeches by Bella Abzug and Benjamin Spock and others, and even slipped away for a furtive cultural visit to the Smithsonian. We hated this blood-soaked war—for weeks at a stretch it seemed as if nothing else were on our minds—but the tone aboard the bus trip and during that long day’s outing was upbeat, almost lighthearted. Our companions—my old college pal Spencer Klaw (he’d been the editor of the Harvard Crimson) and his wife, Bobbie, who was Carol’s associate at American Heritage, and the Klaws’ youngest daughter, Margy—were friends we sometimes joined in November for football games in New Haven and Cambridge, and this embarrassing sense of overlap and gala middle-class smugness about our protest was something we noticed and, in our ironic self-awareness, remarked on. War protesting was more fun than Ivy League football. When our bus stopped at one of the mall-like gas stations on the New Jersey Turnpike, it was a big laugh when the women aboard (who outnumbered us men by about three to one) liberated the men’s rest room. If we sound naïve now, it would be easy to assume that the most pathetic thing about us was our notion that we might make a difference, and change things. Only we did.
Caring about Vietnam made you feel good, and it brought you closer to your kids, as well. My older daughter, Callie, was a student at Goucher College, outside Baltimore, just then, and she came along on another weekend, when we joined a crowd of picketers walking slowly around the White House and chanting, “Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids have you killed today?” We’d voted for Johnson, of course, and had been big fans of his, going back to his time as Senate Majority Leader, but all that was gone now. At some point that day, our slovenly bunch came close to a trail of sightseers, docilely lined up to visit the White House, and Callie suddenly found herself face to face with a long bygone schoolmate.
“Callie, what are you doing here?” the young woman cried.
“No, what are you doing there?” Callie said.
As was happening in many multigenerational families just then, I believe, Callie became our delegate at the spilling-over and increasingly bitter demonstrations. She was there in October of 1967, when the Yippies attempted to levitate the Pentagon, and she told us that night that she’d seen men in the first row of marchers placing flowers inside the barrels of the fixed-bayonet rifles presented by the front row of scared M.P.s. Another time, she joined a line of candle-bearing demonstrators walking slowly around the outskirts of Washington, each with the name of a dead G.I.—dead in Vietnam—hung around his or her neck.
Back to that window. Our apartment was a cheerful third-floor walkup in a brownstone between Fifth and Madison Avenues, on Ninety-fourth Street—a quiet block that unexpectedly became one of the forming-up side streets for marchers heading down Fifth. On the morning of the great ten-thousand-strong parade, Carol and I had a front-row perch looking down at the jammed-together, button- and ribbon-bearing citizenry below. Somewhere a band was playing “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” the Country Joe and the Fish classic everybody knew by heart. The gigantic skulls and caricatures of the Bread and Puppet Theatre tottered and swayed at the top of the block, and we waited while the various group banners—S.D.S. and others—went slowly past, until our own bunch, Veterans for Peace (I was a veteran), came along and we went downstairs and out into the sunshine and marched away, too.
Two weeks later, there was a counter-demonstration, this one in support of the troops in Vietnam, and when I looked out our window the street was full of cops and firemen and union guys, all waving American flags. I found an old shirt cardboard and wrote “STOP THE BOMBING!” on it with a red felt-tip pen, and stuck it up on the window, and at first did not connect this mild message with some deeper new sounds that now came from outside and rose to a roar. A beer can banged off our windowpane in a sudden splatter, and when I looked outside I found a mass of angry, congested faces and brandished fists, all aimed at me. More beer cans were launched, some of them unopened, and some eggs as well. Our landlady, Mrs. Giurgiu, rang our bell and came in, waving her arms. “My God,” she said. “What have you done? Whatever it is, stop.”
I took down the sign but shot a finger at the triumphant crowd, to more shouts and curses. My face was a mirror of theirs by now: the American look. The war had come home.