Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

Author:Rick Perlstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

Be that as it may, it worked. “Everyone is scared about licenses,” a network executive explained to the Los Angeles Times. “You can’t have a television station without a government license, and you can’t have a network without stations.” Two days later, the peaceniks gathered in Washington, D.C., for the New Mobilization’s “march against death.” Conspicuously absent were live network cameras.

They missed a radiant spectacle. At four thirty in the afternoon, in front of the White House, forty thousand pilgrims took turns reciting the names of dead Americans and destroyed hamlets, one after another, until eight thirty the next morning. Each placed a card with the name of one dead in a coffin. The coffins were borne in procession to the Washington Monument to a rolling drum cadence. Three hundred thousand souls took in the subsequent rally. Arlo Guthrie, the folksinging star of Alice’s Restaurant, spoke last, and most briefly: “I don’t need to say anything. It’s all been said before.” He said it as nine thousand troops were stationed to guard the city, and marines manned a machine-gun nest on the Capitol steps.

“We love America enough to call her away from the folly of war,” proclaimed Senator McGovern, who had stuck with the protest after Senators Kennedy and Muskie dropped out when officials warned of plans for “serious violence.” McGovern said the cause was too desperate to abandon: “We meet here today because we cherish our flag.”

Not everyone did. A small group of street fighters chanting, “War, war, one more war! Revolution now!” had tried and failed to break through the line of marshals to rush the White House—ringed by a barricade of empty city buses, just in case. The morning before the vigil began, crazies had marched down Constitution Avenue forty abreast chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” and carrying signs such as STOP THE TRIAL and BEAT NIXON INTO PLOUGHSHARES, then stoned the Justice Department and bashed in the windows with red flags. Helmeted demonstrators pulled down Old Glory and replaced it with the Vietcong banner. The rioting was subdued with tear gas—leading Congressmen Edwin W. Edwards of Louisiana to complain to Washington’s police chief that “gunfire was not only justified but required.” Three days earlier, in the middle of the night, a New York collective had bombed the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building. The day before that—Veterans Day—they bombed the empty offices of Chase Manhattan Bank, Standard Oil, and General Motors. “Corporations have made us into insane consumers,” their manifesto pronounced. “Spiro Agnew may be a household word but it is the rarely seen men like David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, James Roche of General Motors, and Michael Haider of Standard Oil who run the system behind the scenes.”

It advanced Richard Nixon’s preferred story line admirably: that the peopled who vigiled and the people who rioted were working hand in glove.

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