The Day The Pentagon Was Supposed to Lift Off Into Space

A demonstrator offers a flower to military policemen guarding the Pentagon.

(NATIONAL ARCHIVES)

On Saturday, October 21, 1967, Washington, D.C., was rocked by a mass gathering. At least 100,000 people streamed into the nation’s capital that autumn weekend, most of them college-age men and women, many of them students eligible for the military draft, all there to protest the Vietnam War. At the time, about 500 soldiers were dying in Vietnam every month, and more and more Americans were coming to dispute President Johnson’s resolve to prosecute the war to a successful conclusion. That weekend crowds of antiwar activists and GIs met face-to-face, and history was made.

The activities of October 21 and the surrounding days were planned and organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a loose coalition of groups ranging from religious organizations to the leftist Students for a Democratic Society. Saturday’s march on the Pentagon, however, was largely the creation of one man, David Dellinger, who edited a radical journal called Liberation. With the help of the Berkeley activist Jerry Rubin, Dellinger planned to hold a huge rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before leading the assembled demonstrators across the Potomac to take up a position outside the Pentagon. Why the Pentagon, and not the White House or the Capitol? Because Rubin insisted that the Defense Department held the real reins of power.

As the date approached, President Johnson consulted extensively with Attorney General Ramsey Clark about the possibility of civil unrest. Concerned about violent subversives and Communist agitators, Johnson ordered an increased military presence in the capital and even considered surrounding the White House with soldiers. He ultimately had 3,000 troops, mostly military police, and 1,800 National Guardsmen secure the Pentagon. On the antiwar side, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, of Yale University, and the novelist Norman Mailer prepared to be among the demonstrators. Mailer would later win a Pulitzer prize for his account of the protest, The Armies of the Night.

On the day of the demonstration 100,000 people gathered before the Lincoln Memorial. After hours of speeches, including one by Spock declaring “the enemy is Lyndon Johnson,” roughly half of them headed across the Potomac toward the Pentagon. Walking across Arlington Memorial Bridge, they came to a halt before the headquarters of the U.S. military. Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division stood before them. Initially, and for much of the afternoon, the demonstration at the Pentagon was nonviolent. The activists staged sit-ins, sang songs, chanted antiwar slogans, and waved flags. The day’s most famous image is that of a Berkeley radical who called himself “Super Joel” approaching an armed soldier and slipping a flower into the barrel of his gun. Many of his fellow protesters followed suit.

But the day was not destined to end peacefully, and by nightfall the Pentagon steps were stained with blood. As the afternoon wore on, some activists became increasingly combative, hurling insults at the soldiers and pitching rocks through the building’s windows. The protest assumed an intentionally absurd character early on, with Abbie Hoffman, co-founder of the Yippies, promising to levitate the Pentagon into the air, and Allen Ginsberg, the beat poet, leading Tibetan chants in the hope of accomplishing exactly that feat. Ed Sanders led his band the Fugs in an “exorcism” of the building, calling on “the demons of the Pentagon to rid themselves of the cancerous tumors of the war generals.” But the demonstration intensified beyond those eye-catching theatrics. At several points in the afternoon, large groups of demonstrators, including one crowd numbering around 3,000, tried to break through police lines. One small group actually succeeded in entering the Pentagon. They were quickly roughed up by Pentagon security and arrested, but their entry was surely worrisome to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who watched the day’s events unfold from his office window.

When the protesters’ 48-hour permit expired, police quickly dispersed most of them. By the end of the weekend, approximately 680 protesters had been jailed. Nearly 50 had been hospitalized, along with some two dozen soldiers and marshals. However, the chants sung outside the Pentagon that day echoed long after their singers left the capital. Despite the carnival-like atmosphere of much of the proceedings, the discussion over American involvement in Vietnam certainly intensified afterwards, with ever greater numbers of citizens questioning Johnson’s leadership. Some GIs began to sympathize more with the antiwar movement than with their military superiors. The weekend after the march, Democratic Congressman Morris Udall, who would one day run for President himself, reversed his previously staunch support for his own party’s foreign policy. Daniel Ellsberg, a Pentagon employee who watched the protests from inside the building, began questioning the war more intensely; later he would make public the Pentagon Papers, a set of documents that revealed the shocking inner workings of the U.S. war effort.

A weekend of both dead seriousness and utter sillinesss left an entire nation surprised, disturbed, and debating.

—Alexander Burns, an undergraduate at Harvard College, is a frequent contributor to AmericanHeritage.com