Strike Against The War

(Editor's note: Following are excerpts from an article published in TIME magazine on October 17, 1969.)

"MORATORIUM" was scarcely a household word a couple of months ago. The dictionary definition is "a period of permissive or obligatory delay," and to most people it meant a pause in paying one's debts or in talking. Now, suddenly, "moratorium" has become the focus of national attention in its special 1969 sense: M-day, October 15, a movement intended by its organizers and supporters to show the Nixon Administration that large and growing numbers of Americans want out of the Viet Nam war as fast as possible.

Across the nation, M-day observances are aimed at suspending business-as-usual in order to allow protest, debate and thought about the war. The Moratorium demonstrates a diversity and spread unknown in the earlier landmark protests against the war: the march on the Pentagon in October 1967, which inspired Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night, and the bloody riots the following summer in Mayor Daley's Chicago. Each of those involved directly only a minority of the young and the radical intelligentsia, not anything resembling a cross-section of U.S. society.

M-day is different. In Brunswick, Maine, 1,000 candles were to be left burning atop the Senior Center, the tallest building in northern New England. In Washington, 16 Representatives announced that they would keep the House in all-night session in order to speak against the war. In North Newton, Kansas, an antique bell long disused was to be tolled some 40,000 times for the U.S. dead in Viet Nam. In the conservative city of Los Alamos, New Mexico, housewives agreed to block a bridge leading to local defense plants while carrying signs: HELP STOP THE WAR. Students from Gonzaga University and Whitworth College organized a march to the federal building in Spokane, Washington, where they would wear white armbands speckled with blood.

Small-town housewives and Wall Street lawyers, college presidents and politicians, veteran demonstrators and people who have never made the "V" sign of the peace movement -- thousands of Americans who have never thought to grow a beard, don a hippie headband or burn a draft card -- planned to turn out on M-day to register their dismay and frustration over Viet Nam. Yesterday's Vietniks are determined to grow into tomorrow's majority.

What did support for the Moratorium mean? Did it mean backing unconditional withdrawal from Viet Nam? Many of the Moratorium's supporters favored it, but many more did not. Almost certainly the majority of the nation as a whole was not prepared for that step at present.

Within the diversity of M-day protest was one unifying factor: exhaustion of patience with the war, doubt about the pace of Richard Nixon's efforts to end it. Some participants had specific ideas on how to end the war. A five-point proposal came last week from Yale's President Kingman Brewster Jr. and New Haven Mayor Richard Lee, who jointly called for an immediate cease-fire followed within twelve months by withdrawal of all U.S. forces; elections supervised by "a coalition body" dominated by neither side; aid to any South Vietnamese wishing to leave his country; and U.S. economic assistance for rebuilding Viet Nam.

Other protesters, however, were merely obeying their emotions, without any concrete idea of what they wanted the U.S. to do. They would agree with Mrs. Eleanor Bockman, a middle-aged Atlanta housewife: "I think people are thoroughly tired of the war. I think that some middle-class whites are just beginning to realize the depth of poverty in this country. Older people see the emptiness, the burden of the war. Younger people see it as a great waste of talent and life. Everybody knows that there is no answer now to the Viet Nam war, but we've got to let Nixon know."

The M-day movement has been getting bigger partly because its leaders -- who happily confessed that the Moratorium had begun to run them, not they the Moratorium -- cast as wide a net as possible. They appealed to almost anyone unhappy with the war, shunning extremists and avoiding ideological factionalism. The absence of New Left infighting and cant was refreshing. One Columbia student confessed: "It will be nice to go to a demonstration without having to swear allegiance to Chairman Mao."