by Steve Vogel
Anderson—at fifty-five, a tall and proper man regarded in the Navy as a sailor’s sailor and a first-rate strategist—viewed McNamara’s adversarial questioning as improper civilian interference in a military operation. “Mr. Secretary, the Navy has been handling blockades successfully since John Paul Jones,” the admiral finally said, according to McNamara. “If you let us handle this, we’ll do it successfully.”
To McNamara, Anderson was a fine tactical commander who understood nothing of the geopolitics involved. “I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done,” McNamara replied. “I want to know what you are going to do now.”
Anderson, red-faced, waved a copy of the Manual of Naval Regulations in McNamara’s face and told him the procedures were explained within. “Now, Mr. Secretary, if you and your deputy will go back to your offices, the Navy will run the blockade,” Anderson said.
The confrontation—along with several others McNamara and Anderson would have in the Flag Plot over the course of the crisis—made for the tensest moments in the building’s twenty-year history, and quite possibly the most significant. McNamara angrily returned to his office, but at his insistence, the next day the Navy issued a public warning that described its procedures for the Soviets, explaining that U.S. ships trailing submarines would drop four or five harmless explosives in the water as a signal for the vessels to surface and identify themselves.
It did not help. Navy destroyers continued in subsequent days to aggressively track Soviet submarines, whose commanders ignored the explosive signals. They stayed submerged until forced to surface to get air and recharge their batteries, where they were surrounded and spotlighted by Navy ships and surveillance planes. McNamara—and the rest of the world—only learned at a conference in Moscow in 2002 that the Russian submarines had been armed with nuclear-tipped torpedoes. Moreover, the commander of one submarine had mistaken the explosive signals for depth charges, and, angry and exhausted after four days of chase, ordered his nuclear torpedo brought to battle readiness on October 27. “Maybe the war has already started up there, while we are doing somersaults here,” the captain said, according to a Soviet document released in 2002. “We are going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all. We will not disgrace our navy.” More level-headed officers were able to talk the captain back from the brink and prevent an explosion that almost certainly would have led to a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.
For all the marvel and pride in the McNamara-era command and control that could now be exercised from the Pentagon, the sobering truth was that it had been chance, and the decisions of men at sea, that prevented the deaths of millions and the destruction of countries.
On October 28, Khrushchev ordered the removal of the missiles from Cuba. The crisis diffused, the National Military Command Center, the Flag Plot, and the other command centers in the Pentagon could go back to more routine business, including monitoring the status of a small force of American military advisers and Army helicopters that was operating now in South Vietnam.
Antiwar marchers congregate in front of the Pentagon, October 21, 1967.
You had to be scared
Under the cover of darkness through that Friday night, dozens of Army trucks packed with soldiers riding in the back behind tarps rumbled into the Pentagon bus tunnel. By 6 A.M. Saturday, October 21, 1967, nearly 2,400 troops were hidden inside the Pentagon, stationed strategically in corridors near building entrances. Soldiers sat on the floors and chatted with secretaries. Others dozed on their packs and helmets, lying amid their M-14 rifles, field kits, and cases of C rations. The courtyard had the air of an encampment, with field kitchens cooking breakfast and radios crackling at command posts. By afternoon, the final defenses were being readied. Troops installed thirteen tear-gas launchers on the roof, covering various approaches to the building. Throughout the building, a “defender-of-the-castle feeling” prevailed, as one participant described it.
Inside the green-carpeted Army Operations Center conference room, Robert McNamara joined General Harold K. Johnson, the Army chief of staff, and other senior officials around a huge T-shaped table for a final briefing on preparations for a massive antiwar protest meant to shut down the Pentagon that day. Closed-circuit television sets lined one wall, each showing live pictures from seven television cameras that had been mounted on the Pentagon roof to monitor the demonstration from every angle. The overheated operations center was packed with so many officers in full crisis mode that the air-conditioning could not keep up. A map showing Washington and Arlington had replaced the one of Vietnam normally displayed in the war room. Switchboards and teletype machines in adjoining rooms were humming. The ops center, usually monitoring combat half a world away, would on this day be right at the frontline, just ninety feet from the Mall entrance targeted by the demonstrators.
All day, minute-by-minute updates had come in from Army intelligence agents who had infiltrated the marchers assembling at the Lincoln Memorial. Operatives reported seeing militant demonstrators carrying everything from water pistols and walkie-talkies to canisters of tear gas and billy clubs. Other agents reported on the whereabouts of Abbie Hoffman and H. Rap Brown, two of the most notorious protest organizers. Overhead, military reconnaissance aircraft circled the demonstrators. Meanwhile, from twenty-three listening posts set up inside the Pentagon, Army agents with earphones on their heads sat hunched over radio equipment, eavesdropping on citizens’ radios. It was an unprecedented—and illegal—surveillance operation by the Army against Americans.
As the first demonstrators trickled onto the Pentagon grounds, a thin line of military police stood in front of the building’s Mall and River entrances. Despite the overwhelming force hidden in the building and the intelligence flowing into the operations center warning of impending violence, the perimeter of the building had been deliberately left lightly defended.
Colonel Ernie Graves felt uneasy about it. He was the son of Pot Graves, the legendary Corps of Engineers officer and West Point football coach who had commanded Somervell in Mexico and France and served as mentor to Dick Groves. Ernie Graves had grown up at the feet of those larger-than-life Army men and felt a palpable connection to them.
Personable but tough-minded like his father, Graves was the executive assistant to the secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor. In the weeks leading up to the march, Graves sat in on endless debates about what kind of barricades to place in front of the building. Major General Charles S. O’Malley, Jr., commander of the troops defending the Pentagon—Task Force Inside—wanted to ring the building with triple concertina wire or, failing that, a six-foot fence. That idea went nowhere. Drawing on his experience as an engineer, Graves proposed fashioning long, triangular-shaped barriers using four-inch pipes. The barriers would not hurt anybody who pressed against them, yet would remain stable even if protesters flipped them over. But this suggestion was rejected too.
McNamara and Under Secretary of the Army David McGiffert, who was in charge of the building’s defensive preparations, were determined to present an image of a tolerant and beneficent Pentagon. They did not want many troops outside, and they did not want barricades. “They didn’t want to put up any kind of barrier because they felt the media would interpret that as a fortress mentality, and I think probably they’re right,” Graves recalled. “I wasn’t thinking about it in those terms. I was thinking, ‘These poor soldiers needed something between them and those guys.’”
A line of MPs—575 in all—were standing ten feet apart, protecting the two long flanks of the building facing the demonstrators. The soldiers wore plastic helmet liners, without the steel covers, and were dressed in their Class As—jacket-and-tie uniforms appropriate for office duty, not a riot. They were armed with pistols and nightsticks. Behind them, spread out in five-man teams, stood 236 U.S. federal marshals, white helmets on their heads and batons in their hands. A strand of rope, held by rickety wooden stands, protected the government line.
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nbsp; A northeast wind was rippling the trees and shrubs around the Pentagon; after a quarter-century, the plants had matured and softened the edges of the great building. It was a spectacular Indian-summer day, with cool temperatures in the morning warming by afternoon to sixty-eight degrees.
McNamara went to the Pentagon roof to get a better view, scampering near the low parapet like a mountain goat. His bodyguard, Army Chief Warrant Officer Reis Kash, tailed nervously behind, wondering how he would explain if he let the secretary of defense fall off the Pentagon.
From his sweeping vantage point atop the Mall entrance, McNamara was oblivious to the concern. Instead, he stared at the tens of thousands of marchers approaching the Pentagon. “Christ, yes, I was scared,” McNamara later said. “You had to be scared. A mob is an uncontrollable force.”
The true and high church
It had been almost exactly twenty-five years since George Marshall and Henry Stimson had moved into the Pentagon in November 1942, but no celebrations were planned in the fall of 1967. In the five years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tiny American presence in Vietnam had escalated with the introduction of ground forces in 1965 and would soon reach 500,000 troops, with no end in sight. By October, more than 13,000 Americans had been killed and 86,000 wounded. Public opinion was turning against the war, fired both by the growing number of casualties and by reports on great suffering in Vietnam. By mid-1967, for the first time, a near-majority of Americans believed the war was a mistake.
The targeting of the Pentagon by antiwar demonstrators reflected the sinister image that it had assumed in the minds of many Americans. The building had come to personify the “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned of six years earlier. The building’s very size and shape made it the perfect outlet for hostility. Norman Mailer, who would march with the demonstrators and win the Pulitzer Prize for his account of the event, The Armies of the Night, wrote that the protesters “…were going to face the symbol, the embodiment, no, call it the true and high church of the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon, blind five-sided eye of a subtle oppression which had come to America out of the very air of the century…”
There had been previous demonstrations at the Pentagon, the most shocking two years earlier, in the twilight of a November evening in 1965. Standing near a wall on the River terrace outside the building, within sight of the secretary of defense’s office, a thirty-one-year-old Quaker from Baltimore named Norman R. Morrison doused himself with fuel and burned himself to death. He had been holding his one-year-old daughter in his arms, but at some point—whether before or after flames shot up his body is uncertain—the child ended up on the ground, uninjured. Horrified Pentagon workers ran toward them. An Air Force sergeant and an officer tried beating out the flames that were consuming Morrison, but it was too late. McNamara, called to his window by an aide, saw the aftermath and was deeply shaken.
By 1967, protests had became a regular feature of life in the Pentagon. In February, some 2,500 well-dressed women—most carrying large blue shopping bags emblazoned with “Mothers Say Stop the War in Vietnam” in bold green letters—angrily descended on the building. The “shopping-bag brigade,” as The Washington Post called them, shouted antiwar slogans at the River entrance, and several women heatedly banged on the doors of the Pentagon with the heels of their shoes in a futile attempt to meet with McNamara.
The march on the Pentagon on October 21, 1967, was shaping up to be something entirely different. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam—the Mobe, as it was known—had vowed to “shut down the Pentagon” in what it promised would be the greatest antiwar protest in history. The Mobe included a vast array of peace groups and radical organizations with conflicting agendas under its umbrella—“Ghandi and Guerrilla” and most everything in between, as Mobe chairman David Dellinger said.
A healthy dose of comic absurdity was thrown in. Abbie Hoffman, cofounder of the radical Youth International Party (Yippies) and a showman in the tradition of P. T. Barnum, announced plans to use the psychic energy of thousands of protesters to levitate the Pentagon three hundred feet in the air, where it would turn orange and vibrate until all evil spirits spilled out. Several hundred hippies in New York City’s East Village practiced on a table-size cardboard model, chanting ecstatically as wires raised the model Pentagon—illuminated by psychedelic lights—into the air. Hoffman and cohort Marty Carey also made a reconnaissance of the Pentagon to calculate how many “witches” would be needed to encircle the building. “Marty brought some incense and Tibetian bells, we improvised an Apache war dance and proceeded to measure at arm’s length the distance from one corner to the next,” Hoffman later wrote. They measured off 103 lengths before MPs took them into custody.
Not everyone was amused. The White House complained that antiwar protests were aiding Communist forces in Vietnam. The Army, to which McNamara assigned the responsibility for defending the Pentagon, viewed the pending march through the prism of deadly race riots that had flared in the summer of 1967, including one in Detroit that left forty-three people dead. In a speech from the pulpit of a Washington church on July 27, the militant black leader H. Rap Brown advised black residents to “get you some guns” and “burn this town down.” Violence, he told reporters that day, “is as American as cherry pie.”
When the Mobe held a press conference in August describing its plans to block entrances to the Pentagon and disrupt its activities, Brown was among the organizers who spoke, setting off alarms within the Army. “I may bring a bomb, sucker,” Brown announced. Moreover, Mobe organizers described plans for simultaneous rallies in black neighborhoods in Washington. Army planners envisioned a nightmare scenario in which tens of thousands of demonstrators intent on attacking the Pentagon might spill over and ignite a race riot in Washington.
“This confrontation was no ordinary one,” said an Army report written two weeks after the march. “…The government’s response thus had to be extraordinary, if it were to deal with all aspects of the challenge—physical, psychological, political and international—in a manner worthy of the nation.”
This “extraordinary” response included spying on Americans. Following the lead of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had instructed the CIA and FBI to begin surveillance of antiwar leaders, General Johnson on October 14 approved electronic eavesdropping on the Pentagon demonstrators, despite a congressional prohibition against it. The Army Security Agency was authorized to monitor citizens, police, taxi, and amateur radio during the march, something never previously done. The agency was also told to jam radio transmissions if necessary. The National Security Agency hunted for evidence of “foreign influence” among march organizers, another unprecedented measure.
In the days before the march, soldiers flew in from around the country, including contingents of military police from the Presidio in San Francisco, Fort Hood in Texas, and Fort Dix in New Jersey. Troops were also sent from ten Army installations in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia, among them elements of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment, and the 91st Engineer Battalion.
The Army also wanted to bring up a brigade of paratroopers from the elite 82nd Airborne Division in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and hold it in reserve at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in case of riots. Attorney General Ramsey Clark opposed the move, but the Army hotly protested. “I can appreciate the image implications associated with the Attorney General’s decision, but from a military standpoint I regard it imprudent and, indeed, dangerous not to pre-position this brigade,” Brigadier General Harris W. Hollis, director of operations for the chief of staff, told superiors. At the last minute, shortly before 11 P.M. Friday night, President Johnson approved the deployment. C-130 transports flew into Andrews through the night and all 2,900 paratroopers were in position at the base by shortly after noon on Saturday. Some forty Army helicopters, forty-five buses, and sixty-four trucks were staged at Andrews, read
y to move the brigade to the Pentagon or wherever needed around Washington. In all, more than 12,000 soldiers, National Guard troops, federal marshals, and civilian police officers were available in the Washington area; another 25,000 troops around the country had their weekend passes denied and were on alert in case needed.
For all the extraordinary measures, an overriding concern was that it all be hidden from public view. It was a cynical deception, of course, yet in part also a sincere effort to demonstrate tolerance. McGiffert, the under secretary of the Army, argued that this stance would give the Pentagon the moral high ground. One of the Army’s goals for the march, he told McNamara on the morning of October 21, was “to show the world that in troubled times this nation is strong enough and confident enough to permit expressions of criticism which few other governments would dare tolerate.”
The zeal to show tolerance, however admirable, had created an atmosphere in which appearances were more important than practicality. Most troubling was the convoluted command structure. General O’Malley was the operational commander, but in name only. General Johnson retained overall military command, including any decision to load weapons, fix bayonets, or use tear gas. Yet Johnson had little authority himself. McNamara retained the final decision on the use of force. “I told the president no rifle would be loaded without my permission, and I did not intend to give it,” McNamara later wrote. At the insistence of the White House, the attorney general’s approval was needed not only for making arrests but also for committing the reserves hidden in the building. Civilian direction was supposed to be shared by McGiffert and Deputy Attorney General Warren Christopher, who would be positioned at the Pentagon, but decisions on the use of force and reinforcements would have to be cleared by Attorney General Clark, the overall coordinator of the federal response, over a hotline connecting the operations center to the Department of Justice command post in Washington. O’Malley had less power than a traffic cop.
