by Steve Vogel
The day before the march, at 4:45 on Friday afternoon, General Johnson brought all the military commanders together in the Army Operations Center. Johnson was a tough, spare North Dakota native, a West Point graduate with little political tact. Taken prisoner by the Japanese in the Philippines in 1942, Johnson survived the Bataan Death March, weighing ninety pounds upon his liberation in 1945. He had seen some of the toughest fighting in Korea, from the Pusan breakout on, and had been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism. Johnson was not particularly worried about the demonstrators descending on the Pentagon.
The Army chief of staff told his commanders that he had met with McNamara and the service secretaries, and the message was clear: “This is looked upon as fundamentally a public relations problem,” Johnson said.
The situation became extremely fluid
A vast cross-section of America came marching across Memorial Bridge toward the Pentagon on the afternoon of Saturday, October 21. More than fifty thousand people had rallied late in the morning at the Lincoln Memorial for speeches and songs, though not all continued to the Pentagon. Claims by organizers of 100,000 or more marchers notwithstanding, counts made by two intelligence agencies of the number of protesters crossing the bridge—and corroborated by analysis of high-resolution photographs made by a Navy Skywarrior reconnaissance plane—put the figure closer to 35,000. It was by any measure an impressive and powerful showing, far exceeding any Pentagon demonstration before or since.
The great majority of marchers were intent on a peaceful demonstration; for many it was an act of conscience against a war they deeply opposed; for others it was simply a lark, a chance to join in the excitement of a youth movement challenging authority and promising free love. A much smaller but not insignificant number of marchers were intent on destruction. Army intelligence concluded after the march that there had been “probably fewer than 500 violent demonstrators; however these violent types were backed by from 2,000 to 2,500 ardent sympathizers.” The actions of this hardcore minority would dominate the day and form the lasting impressions of the march.
Marching at the front, arms linked, were prominent antiwar demonstrators including Dave Dellinger, Jerry Rubin, Norman Mailer, the poet Robert Lowell, and Benjamin Spock, the beloved pediatrician and author of books on raising babies (an Army report noted with suspicion that he advocated “permissive child rearing”). Great cheers greeted a contingent of veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, who had fought the fascists in Spain and now marched carrying a sign reading “No More Guernicas.” The crowd was mostly young, with sizable contingents of middle-aged and older protesters. Many of the college students looked as if they were dressed for a homecoming football game, the men in tweed jackets and flannels, the women in stylish skirts and stockings. Long-haired hippies wearing love beads and leather bells lent a colorful shade to the crowd.
High on spirit but low on organization, the marchers started and stopped their way across the bridge with excruciating slowness beginning about 1:45. Arriving in Virginia, Mailer got his first glimpse of the Pentagon, which he likened to the five-sided nozzle on a can of antiperspirant, “spraying the deodorant of its presence all over the fields of Virginia.” The demonstrators marched through the fields of the old Arlington Farm and on to the concrete fortress. The route marked by police channeled marchers into the North parking lot, where a platform had been set up for speeches at a spot more than a thousand feet from the Pentagon, separated from the building by an eight-foot chain-link fence, a four-lane roadway, an abandoned railroad line, and an embankment. Protesters were also allowed to assemble on a large grassy triangle much closer to the building, directly below the raised Pentagon Mall plaza. But access to the grassy area was not clearly marked, and many arriving marchers were under the impression they were fenced off from the building. Demonstrators, Mailer among them, milled about in confusion, unsure of where to go or what to do. “No enemy was visible, nor much organization,” he wrote. “[T]he parking lot was so large and so empty that any army would have felt small in its expanse.”
Walter Teague and several hundred militants from a group known as the Revolutionary Contingent had a distinct purpose in mind. After crossing the bridge, they tore off from the main body and raced toward the building. Teague, a thirty-one-year-old New Yorker and tough veteran of the radical movement, wearing a white crash helmet on his head and a gas mask strapped to his side, ran at the forefront, flanked by two demonstrators carrying fifteen-foot staffs with the red, blue, and gold flag of the Viet Cong. “Our specific goal was to create a confrontation—a nonviolent one, because they were military and we were not—and make a physical effort to get into the Pentagon,” Teague recalled nearly forty years later. Scouts dispatched by Teague found—or created—a gap in the roadway fence that separated the North parking lot from the Pentagon, and they ran for it. At 3:59, a call came in to the Army operations center warning that at least two hundred demonstrators, some armed with ax handles and gas masks, had broken through the fence and were charging the River entrance, which had been left even more lightly guarded than the Mall.
Chanting “Viva Che!”—Guevara, the Latin American revolutionary, had been captured and executed in Bolivia two weeks earlier—the shock troops rushed toward a line of a dozen MPs, who waited with their riot sticks held high. Teague called for his colleagues to slow down and link arms. The first row of demonstrators slammed into the soldiers, and the Battle of the Pentagon was on. A protester swung a picket sign at a soldier, a U.S. marshal grabbed a Viet Cong flag, and an MP clubbed a protester in the back. More demonstrators followed the lead of Teague’s shock troops and rushed through gaps in the fence; as the crowd grew, it flowed toward the Mall entrance and was soon pressing at the rope barrier.
It was quickly apparent that the whole low-profile strategy had backfired. Rather than somehow mollifying the advancing protesters, the sight of the Pentagon guarded by a thin green line seemed only to encourage those intent on attacking the building. “The low visibility philosophy may have developed an air of over confidence on the part of demonstrators and encouraged violence,” an Army report written soon after the march concluded. Teague, for one, was both surprised and relieved there were not more soldiers protecting the Pentagon.
O’Malley, the operational commander, recognized instantly that his men were in trouble, and at 3:59 requested reinforcements from the building to block the demonstrators. Minutes later, Johnson, McGiffert, and Christopher agreed to send troops to the River entrance and the Mall plaza. But the reinforcements could not be dispatched until approved by Attorney General Clark across the river in Washington. The call was made and they waited.
From his office window, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Nitze watched with alarm as demonstrators advanced below on the River entrance. At 4:03 he called McGiffert. “What gives?” Nitze asked. “Are you going to let them come up there?”
The crowd at the Mall plaza was likewise surging, and at 4:12 demonstrators on one side broke through the useless rope barrier and began shoving MPs. Still no approval had come from Clark, and no reinforcements were allowed out of the building, despite the rapidly deteriorating situation. Five minutes later, at 4:17, the operations center received Clark’s O.K. A minute later—nearly twenty minutes after O’Malley had initially requested them—soldiers came running out of the building, some with sheathed bayonets fixed to their M-14 rifles. They were able to contain the crowd, and demonstrators who did not fall back were arrested by U.S. marshals.
Soldiers were not supposed to fix bayonets without Johnson’s authorization, which the chief of staff had not given; subordinates later blamed the confusion on the stress of the moment but did not pretend to be apologetic about it. “The vision of the fixed bayonets by the incendiary demonstrators was regarded by many as a psychological plus in containing the restive crowd,” an Army report said. McGiffert, though, was unhappy when he saw the sheathed bayonets on television monitors. “This is not in accordance w
ith instructions,” McGiffert complained to Johnson. At 4:25, Johnson ordered the bayonets removed.
The violence was kept momentarily at bay, but the twenty-minute free-for-all had emboldened the crowd and encouraged a sense of anarchy. “From this point on, the situation became extremely fluid,” an Army report said. More protesters moved up, many not looking for trouble but soon caught up in the chaos.
At the rope barriers, a small but vocal group of demonstrators—usually those hiding several rows back—taunted and abused the troops. “They spat on some of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander,” James Reston of the New York Times reported. Others pelted troops with eggs, overripe tomatoes, fish, and plastic bags filled with beef liver. The soldiers, under orders to hold the line but left without masks or protective shields, made easy targets.
Captain Phil Entrekin, the commander of the 6th Cavalry’s 1st Squadron, C Troop and a Vietnam veteran, considered the lack of protection afforded his soldiers the “dumbest decision” he would see in more than twenty years with the Army. “Our kids were standing there and having all kinds of things thrown at them, to include feces,” he recalled.
Ernie Graves, accompanying Secretary of the Army Resor and other senior Army officials inside the Pentagon as they monitored the demonstration, was burned up by what he saw. “My own personal reaction was that it was somewhat of a travesty to put these soldiers out there in what I saw as a disadvantageous position and let these people abuse them,” Graves said. “I frankly thought it was cowardly.”
Out, demons, out!
Elsewhere, the crowd was more entertaining than ugly. Abbie Hoffman, wearing a tall Uncle Sam hat, went about his effort to levitate the Pentagon, but did not get far. He and his wife, Anita, split their last tab of LSD, held hands, and approached the building until they were stopped by MPs. “We’re Mr. and Mrs. America, and we declare this liberated territory,” Hoffman cried.
Nearby in the North parking lot, from atop a flatbed truck equipped with a sound system, musicians sounded an Indian triangle and a cymbal. They were “The Fugs,” an underground music group from New York assisting with the levitation. Coming upon the scene, Mailer described them in their orange, yellow, and rose capes, as looking “at once like Hindu gurus, French musketeers, and Southern cavalry captains.” The Fugs offered a sing-song litany of exorcism, chanting “Out, demons, out!” for a full fifteen minutes. A supporting cast of flower children sang their own hopeful incantations.
The Pentagon, by most accounts, did not move.
Hippies danced up to the lines of soldiers and placed flowers in the muzzles of their rifles. Some soldiers shook out the flowers, but one young soldier stayed motionless, unsure what to do. His sergeant solved the problem. “Jones, get that fucking flower out of your muzzle,” the sergeant ordered.
Mike Jenkins, Peter Jenkins and Brad Goodwin
The march on the Pentagon, October 21, 1967.
Some women went about trying to convert the soldiers, flirting with them or making impassioned if ponderous antiwar arguments. Others were simply crude and mocking. Some women tested the soldiers’ resolve by trying to unzip their flies; one coarsely propositioned the troops, promising to take them to the bushes if they would drop their rifles. “Of course, none of the soldiers said anything,” wrote Allen Woode, who witnessed the episode. “So, after trying this with several of the boys, she left, calling them all machines and fascists and fairies, and feeling smug.” One young woman grabbed the groin of one of Captain Entrekin’s C Troop soldiers; he reflexively butted her with his rifle, and she fell to the ground bleeding from her head. It was a violent sight that shocked soldiers and protestors alike.
The holy of holies
The first round of trouble at 4 P.M. was only a precursor for a second, more violent wave an hour later. Angry demonstrators surrounding the Mall plaza launched a three-pronged assault on the building. About a thousand protestors swarmed around the northeast corner of the plaza and moved on the River entrance, while another group broke off in the opposite direction toward the heliport and battled with troops manning roadblocks on Washington Boulevard. The main body of the crowd surged forward against the line of MPs at the Mall plaza, many of them cursing, throwing bottles and rocks, and slashing at soldiers with picket signs.
Frank Naughton, an Army military intelligence special agent posing as a reporter wearing slacks, a sports shirt, and a silly camera around his neck, saw a demonstrator kicking an MP who had fallen to the ground. Naughton, a big man, waded into the crowd and walloped the demonstrator. “I blew my cover,” he recalled.
A platoon of MPs ran out to reinforce the sagging line at the front edge of the Mall plaza, where steps led up from the lawn, but they were immediately overwhelmed by demonstrators who overran the rope barriers. In the ensuing struggle, many MPs were knocked to the ground, an Army report said, and thirteen tear-gas grenades “were seized by the demonstrators who proceeded to employ them against the troops.” As clouds of gas drifted about the Mall and River entrances, demonstrators, soldiers, and reporters alike gagged and felt their eyes burning; a female demonstrator fainted and at least one MP was overcome. Protest leaders later accused the Army of using tear gas; the Army indignantly blamed the demonstrators, and there is no evidence in the official record that the high command approved using tear gas. Based on eyewitness accounts and circumstantial evidence, it is fair to conclude that in the wild melee, both soldiers and demonstrators threw tear gas.
The protesters who had reached the Mall plaza also made good use of the worthless rope barriers. Knots were tied in the ropes and they were tossed down high walls that protected the plaza from the bulk of the demonstrators on the grassy triangle below. With the lines secured at the top, protesters below scaled the walls like mountain climbers to reach the plaza. Bill Ayers, a mop-haired, twenty-one-year-old militant from Michigan, watched the first wave of protesters climb the wall and then went up himself. The scene on the Mall plaza, with troops rushing about and tear gas floating in the air, felt to him like Ten Days That Shook the World.
Inside, McGiffert watched the disintegrating scene with disquietude. “No reason to hold back now,” he told Christopher. More reinforcements were brought out of the building. At 5:05, 6th Cavalry troops burst out of the Mall entrance and ran down the steps with M-14 rifles and tried to restore order, and others were sent to the River and heliport sides.
It was not enough to stop the surging crowd. At 5:30, thirty demonstrators who had climbed a hill to the left of the Mall steps spotted an opening in the Army’s flank. They rushed through it and ran for an open door to the left of the main Mall entrance. The Army’s perimeter crumbled. Soon about two thousand demonstrators had broken through the Mall security line and pressed toward the building. The first thirty demonstrators, meanwhile, made it up the steps and victoriously stormed through the outer door. “The line was too thin and we just began pressing forward,” twenty-four-year-old Leonard Brody of New York later said. “We were so surprised we made it through, we kept looking around to see if it was true.” It was. The Pentagon—“the Holy of Holies,” Mailer called it—had been breached.
The “Seventh-Corridor Rush,” as it became known in Army reports, was the high-water mark of the march, but it did not last long. As soon as the protesters entered the door, a company of soldiers from the 91st Engineer Battalion waiting just inside the corridor came rushing out, smashing violently into the demonstrators. McNamara happened to be in the corridor and was nearly caught between the protesters and rushing soldiers. Kash, his bodyguard, pushed McNamara into the nearest office and held the door shut as the soldiers rushed by. The intruders were hit with rifle butts and driven back, leaving the steps spattered with blood. Four demonstrators made it past the inner door and into the building before they were pounced on by soldiers and roughly ejected. The entrance was secured by a thick wall of soldiers.
The Mall plaza remained in chaos. “They
were closing ranks in front of the building, but by that time, hundreds and then thousands of people were up there,” Ayers recalled. Hundreds of protesters ran up to the Pentagon walls, chased through the bushes by soldiers and marshals. Some of the demonstrators hurled rocks at the building, breaking five windows, including two in the press room. Others scrawled obscenities onto the limestone façade. “Crush Imperialism with Sex,” someone wrote. Many took advantage of the opportunity to urinate on the building. Calling through bullhorns, protest leaders directed demonstrators to sit on the pavement and occupy the captured space.
In the operations center, General Johnson was fed up and urged force to clear out the intruders. “I think we ought to get some cold steel and start using some gas,” the Army chief of staff told Christopher at 5:44. Christopher did not rule out unsheathing bayonets and using tear gas but told Johnson they should wait. “We should first attempt to move the people back with troops,” the deputy attorney general said.
Yet the demonstration had peaked. As darkness fell, the crowd thinned, many boarding buses that were due to leave for distant cities, others trudging off on foot in search of something to eat. But several thousand hardcore protesters remained, including hundreds still occupying the Mall plaza. Johnson still wanted to use bayonets and gas to move them back. McNamara, after making another reconnaissance from the roof, turned him down. “Let boredom, hunger and cold take their course,” the secretary said.
Most protesters managed to stay warm. Numerous bonfires sprung up, fed by the placards, pamphlets, and debris. “[W]hat prehistoric forms the dark bulk of the Pentagon must have taken from its spark, how the figures studying them with field glasses must have looked—how much like gargoyles on the ridge of a cathedral,” Mailer wrote. Indeed, an intelligence report was soon sent to the Army operations center reporting on ten bonfires on the pavement and grass near the Mall entrance: “All are presently sitting around singing…. People appear to be cooking.”
