As Occupy Wall Street appears to be expanding nationwide and hitting resistance as well as gaining momentum, it’s fitting to remember the 44th anniversary of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, during which Americans protested the Johnson administration’s escalation of the Vietnam War.
The March on the Pentagon was large; an estimated 100,000 people attended an initial rally near the Lincoln Memorial, and 30,000 marched across the Arlington Memorial Bridge to the Pentagon. Time Magazine’s account of the March describes the diverse mix of protesters as “hard-eyed revolutionaries, skylarking hippies; ersatz motorcycle gangs and all-too-real college professors; house wives, ministers, and authors, Black Nationalists in African garb–but no real African nationalists; nonviolent pacifists and notpacific advocates of violence–some of them anti-anti-warriors and American Nazis spoiling for a fight.” Similar but smaller protests –and counter protests supporting the Vietnam War– were held throughout the US.
I stumbled across two March on the Pentagon documents that are pretty jarring. The first is an October 20, 1967 memo from the Director of the National Security Agency which asked the Agency to spy on the “activities of ‘peace’ groups and ‘black power’ organizations” and report back. It asked, “Is [there] evidence of any foreign action to develop or control these anti-Vietnam and other domestic demonstrations?” In the second, the Agency confirmed, “We are concentrating additional and continuing effort to obtain SIGINT [Signal intelligence–information through phone taps].” (more…)
