New York at War

by Steven H. Jaffe

  By the mid-1950s, analysts correctly assumed that the Russians would soon have intercontinental missiles that would reduce warning times to half an hour at most—hardly time even to prepare a fraction of the city’s population to flee. “Getting out of the city on short notice—as any pre-holiday traveler can testify—is no mean feat,” Bernard Stengren reminded New York Times readers in 1955. And some questions remained unanswered. “Who is to go first,” Stengren asked, “school children, mothers with children, families?” Recalling Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, he suggested that panic might turn any orderly movement into a free-for-all. And would fallout, carried by unpredictable winds, really spare the suburbs?30

  Then there was the question of how welcoming the suburbs might actually be. In April 1955, William J. Slater, Westchester County’s director of Civil Defense, warned New Yorkers against seeking safe haven in his jurisdiction when he declared that he would “mobilize civil defense forces to prevent an evacuation of New York City in the event of an enemy attack.” Evidently the vision of millions of city dwellers swarming over the Bronx border into Westchester—a county already beset by tensions over the arrival of Jewish, black, and Puerto Rican migrants from the city—did not appeal to Slater.31

  City and state administrators tried to prevent outlying communities from shutting their doors to New Yorkers in the case of a nuclear emergency. Indeed, New York City had recently gone toe to toe with Slater, removing a billboard erected on the Hutchinson River Parkway stating that “the boundary would be closed in case of enemy attack.” Slater insisted that similar signs posted on the Boston Post Road, the Bronx River Parkway, and the Sawmill River Parkway would remain in place. State officials quickly overrode him, announcing that civilian cars would be permitted to evacuate into and through Westchester. Such confusion—along with numerous science fiction stories depicting gun-toting suburbanites driving nuclear refugees away from their private bomb shelters—must have given many New Yorkers further reason to doubt the realism of evacuation.32

  If all else failed, the government would try to shoot Russian bombers and missiles out of the sky. In the mid and late 1950s, residents of such New York City suburbs as Huntington, Long Island, and Spring Valley, New York, and Summit, New Jersey, began to encounter barbed wire fences, gated roadways, and even soldiers with guard dogs keeping them out of mysterious compounds in remote corners of their towns. Behind the fences and dogs, army and National Guard troops manned installations equipped with batteries of Nike antiaircraft missiles. By 1961, the city was encircled by a ring of nineteen Nike batteries. New York was not alone; fifty-six other major cities, air force bases, and power plants obtained Nike batteries.33

  If Russian Tu-4 bombers managed to elude American fighter jets once they crossed early-warning radar networks strung across Canada and the Great Plains and on “Texas Towers” (modified oil rigs) off the New England coast, Nike bases would use their own radar systems and computers to home in on the bombers. Stored underground in protective magazines, the one-ton, thirty-two-foot long Nike Ajax missiles would be lifted by elevator to their ground level launch rails and fired at a range of about thirty miles to demolish the incoming Russian planes. In 1958, new, more powerful Nike Hercules missiles—armed with forty-kiloton nuclear warheads, equivalent to the Hiroshima bomb—began to replace the Ajax series in order to meet the threat of Soviet intercontinental missiles. Aimed at a cluster of incoming missiles detected by radar, the “Hercs” would theoretically climb to a height of a hundred thousand feet, exploding and destroying the enemy projectiles before they got within seventy-five miles of New York City. By 1959, New York City—Fort Tilden at Rockaway Beach, Queens, to be exact—was home to a battery of operational atomic warheads; nine other suburban bases nearby were also armed with “Hercs.”

  The families enjoying the summer surf at Jacob Riis Park, a few hundred yards down the beach from Fort Tilden, may have taken some comfort from the presence of such formidable defenses, if they knew or thought about them at all. The army made no attempt to conceal the presence of defensive warheads in the metropolitan area, seeking instead to win over worriers (and, perhaps, discourage the Russians) by holding press conferences and organizing public exhibits. The “possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident . . . is virtually non-existent,” Major General Nathaniel A. Burnell 2nd of the First Region, Army Air Defense Command at Fort Totten, assured reporters in 1957.34

  But Burnell was wrong. On May 22, 1958, maintenance work being done on a Nike Ajax missile at a base at Middletown, New Jersey, somehow went awry; the missile exploded, detonating others nearby, costing six soldiers and four civilians their lives. Fortunately, the Ajax was not nuclear. But two years later, a nuclear missile at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey caught fire and leaked melting radioactive plutonium. The accident could not trigger a nuclear reaction, and crews quickly sealed off the contaminated area (it remains off-limits to this day and will be for centuries). Yet when news of the fire reached New York City, at least fifty people placed anxious calls to civil defense offices, pressing for information on the danger of drifting radioactive fallout; McGuire operators had to field a “flood” of incoming phone queries. While officials continued to insist that defense against Russian nuclear assault was crucial, some wondered whether the local “protection” might be more deadly than the foreign threat.35

  Nike Hercules missiles stand ready at Fort Hancock, Sandy Hook, c. 1969. NPS / GATEWAY NRA MUSEUM COLLECTION.

  Acknowledging in 1950 that New York would be a “first target” in a nuclear strike, the editors of the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal expressed the resignation that many felt: “A man knows that he is a part of it—these buildings, these streets, these subway crowds . . . and that if one day they are blasted into nothingness, then he should be there. . . . One stays where one is, hopes for the best and plans to do his part should the worst come.” But by the mid-1950s, some New Yorkers were shedding such fatalism and daring to challenge the prevailing assumptions propounded by the government and mainstream press. During Operation Alert 1955, twenty-seven pacifists led by the indefatigable Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement were arrested after refusing to leave City Hall Park to seek shelter once the alarm siren sounded. “We will not obey this order to pretend, to evacuate, to hide . . . ,” Day declared in a pamphlet. “We know this drill to be a military act in a cold war to instill fear, to prepare the collective mind for war.”36

  Over the next few years, Day and her fellow pacifists—including A. J. Muste of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and leaders of the War Resisters League such as the black activist Bayard Rustin—led others in public acts of civil disobedience during Operation Alert. They faced fines imposed by hostile judges and physical abuse endured in detention; Day and several others repeatedly served brief prison terms. Day and Muste were seasoned veterans of the struggles to gain conscientious objector status for pacifists during World War II; Muste’s New York antiwar activism, in fact, dated back to 1915. In different ways they each embraced a vision of a peaceful Christian and socialist society that rejected the inhumanity of both Soviet communism and American-style capitalism.

  But “ordinary” New Yorkers, fearing for the lives of their families, also began to take part in the growing pacifist movement. On April 15, 1959, twenty-four-year-old Mary Sharmat, pushing her young son Jimmy’s stroller, sat down on a bench in the center island of Broadway at Eighty-Sixth Street. As the Operation Alert siren sounded, and as hundreds of pedestrians stopped to watch, she quietly explained herself to a civil defense officer: “I cannot take shelter. I do not believe in this.” A policeman threatened her with a fine, then smiled, and let her go, to the fury of the civil defense men. Five miles downtown, another young mother, twenty-one-year-old Janice Smith, brought her two-and four-year-old children to Dorothy Day’s fifth annual demonstration in City Hall Park. “All this drill does is frighten children and birds,” Smith told policemen and re
porters. “I will not raise my children to go underground.” She was arrested but then released without being charged. Sharmat and Smith quickly linked up, and through phone calls and playground recruitment they mobilized a growing network of young middle-class mothers and their husbands to practice civil disobedience. “PEACE is the only defense against nuclear war,” declared a leaflet drafted by Smith and Sharmat’s new group, the Civil Defense Protest Committee. The committee’s literature looked to Gandhi for inspiration.37

  On May 3, 1960, one thousand women, children, and men crowded into City Hall Park. As Sharmat recalled, “Many men came down. Our skirts gave them courage. We loaned out extra babies to bachelors who had the misfortune to be childless.” Five hundred adults willing to be arrested stayed put as the sirens blared; when a civil defense official mounted a bench and declared them all under arrest, the crowd cheered. The fifteen men and eleven women actually arrested were sentenced to five days in jail. The following year, 2,500 New Yorkers practiced civil disobedience in City Hall Park during Operation Alert. By then, demonstrations were also being held in cities across the country and on college campuses throughout the Northeast.38

  Operation Alert 1961 was the last such drill. The Kennedy administration, embarrassed by news coverage of the protests and increasingly adverse editorial opinion, quietly canceled 1962’s exercise. Just as importantly, the protests—the first large-scale public demonstrations against the prospect of nuclear annihilation—energized middle-class New Yorkers who otherwise might have thought twice about joining radical leftist groups. They filled the ranks of new disarmament organizations such as SANE and Women Strike for Peace, which would play an active role nationwide as the 1960s unfolded. Women Strike for Peace became a proving ground for New Yorkers like the lawyer Bella Abzug, the pacifist Cora Weiss, and other women activists. Their lobbying and public relations savvy helped persuade John Kennedy to sign a limited nuclear test ban treaty in 1963 and also paved the way for their impending roles in national politics.

  A new generation coming to maturity—the Duck and Cover generation—began to find its voice in these demonstrations in New York’s streets and parks. Inspired by the emerging Southern civil rights movement and exhilarated by the decline of McCarthyism, young New Yorkers sang “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” and courted arrest in City Hall Park. For some, the schoolroom drills began a process of radicalization that would continue to build. Looking back, Robert K. Musil, leader of Physicians for Social Responsibility, found the roots of a new decade in the schoolhouse drills: “The styles and explosions of the 1960s were born in those dank, subterranean highschool corridors near the boiler room where we decided that our elders were indeed unreliable.” Duck and Cover veterans from New York City would go on to populate the leadership ranks of the New Left: Mario Savio from Queens became the face and voice of the student free speech movement at Berkeley, Todd Gitlin from the Bronx would be a president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and an antiwar activist, and Mickey Melendez from Spanish Harlem would cofound the militant Puerto Rican organization the Young Lords.39

  A new youth counterculture, spilling out from Greenwich Village coffeehouses into open-air performances in Washington Square, posited the bomb as a symbol of everything wrong and insane in American society. “People were building bomb shelters everywhere,” folksinger John Cohen later recalled. “ . . . Here we were in the middle of Greenwich Village like a little pus pimple in the middle of this huge society, saying . . . I’m not going to live my life that way.” Yet despite the protests emanating from New York’s bohemian quarter, the confrontations between President Kennedy and Russian Premier Khrushchev—over Berlin in 1961, over Cuban missiles in 1962—meant that the Cold War might grow very hot at any moment. “The night of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Cohen remembered, “ . . . the general feeling was the world was going to end or something.” Walking into the Gaslight Café on Mac-Dougal Street, Cohen saw his young friend Bob Dylan up on stage, singing to a small audience. Cohen joined Dylan to sing the country standard, “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone.” All the while Cohen was thinking, “who’s going to miss us when we’re gone? We’re all [going to be] gone! . . . What the hell is this?” Dylan was soon singing one of his own songs, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” in the Village coffeehouses, an anthem that defied civil defense preparations and embodied the disobedience now linking venerable pacifists, middle-class families, and a growing body of students throughout the country.40

  The songs, the street rallies, and the acts of civil disobedience would soon have a new focal point, a country nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia, a place that would soon fill the living rooms of New Yorkers with bloody images and their streets with angry crowds.

  On August 8, 1964, a small midtown demonstration foreshadowed the future in ways no New Yorker could predict or realize. Some sixty men and women, mostly of college age, gathered in Duffy Square, at Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street, with placards reading “U.S. Troops Out of Vietnam.” They were led by a student organization called the May 2 Movement, and they included members of small leftist groups active on local campuses, mostly Trotskyist and Maoist, including Youth Against War and Fascism and the New York Spartacist Committee. Their chants that day drew connections between the civil rights movement and opposition to American foreign policy. Early August 1964 was the tense climax of Freedom Summer; three hundred Northern students had flocked to Mississippi to help blacks register to vote. Four days earlier, the bodies of white New Yorkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman and black Mississippian James Chaney had been unearthed near Philadelphia, Mississippi, where local Klansmen had buried the three Congress of Racial Equality activists after murdering them. Three weeks earlier, Harlem had exploded in four days of rioting after a white policeman fatally shot a black teenager. “Protest Police Brutality—Here and in Vietnam,” and “Send Troops to Mississippi—Not Vietnam,” the Duffy Square demonstrators chanted.41

  Citing a ban on political demonstrations in midtown, put into effect after a 1962 antinuclear testing rally, Captain John McAllister of the Sixteenth Precinct ordered the Duffy Square protesters to disperse. Many refused. As the group chanted “Fascist Cops! Fascist Cops!” mounted policemen and patrolmen on foot charged into them with nightsticks swinging. A reporter watched as a young woman “went at a patrolman with both fists,” and as “a young man in a green T-shirt made himself as stiff as a board and was loaded into a police car.” Seventeen were taken to the precinct house by patrol car and taxicab. As the arrestees’ friends marched and chanted in a circle outside the precinct on Forty-Seventh Street, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés living in adjoining tenements leaned out their windows, jeered, and poured water on them. As the Cold War grew hot again in a remote region of Southeast Asia, the inhabitants of the nation’s most cosmopolitan city once more brought the conflicting passions and ideologies of a foreign war into their own streets.42

  On August 7, the day before the Duffy Square protest, Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon Johnson authority to commit American forces against Communist North Vietnam and Communist guerillas fighting the South Vietnamese government. But Vietnam had already gained the attention of New York pacifists a year earlier, when, on the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, two young Catholic Workers, Thomas Cornell and Christopher Kearns, picketed the residence of South Vietnam’s permanent observer to the United Nations, Mrs. Tran Van Chuong, in the East Sixties. South Vietnam’s despotic president, Ngo Dinh Diem, himself a Catholic, had sparked international uproar and embarrassed his ally, President Kennedy, by launching a violent persecution of his nation’s Buddhist majority. “We demand an end to U.S. military support of Diem’s government,” Cornell’s and Kearns’s picket signs read. The strategic advantage of demonstrating in the nation’s media capital became clear when ABC News sent a television crew to cover and broadcast a rally by the two men and 250 supporters on the tenth day
of their protest.43

  Religious pacifists and student members of an emerging New Left were fashioning the tactics of an antiwar movement before most Americans were even paying attention to developments in Indochina. By the late summer and fall of 1964, in fact, a coalition of groups and individuals was coming together in opposition to Johnson’s accelerating intervention in Vietnam. Demonstrators brought the energy of the nuclear disarmament and anti–civil defense movements to a new cause. At rallies in Washington Square Park, a thousand New Yorkers listened to the octogenarian socialist leader Norman Thomas and the septuagenarians A. Philip Randolph and A. J. Muste—three men who, between them, had given over 150 years of work for progressive change—denounce the war. Muste insisted on the need “to keep the issue of Vietnam before the public, and before the Administration.”44

  More than altruism propelled the new protest movement. By 1965 and 1966, Mickey Melendez and other recent high school graduates faced a new and dangerous world. “Adulthood had arrived, and along with it, the war . . . ,” Melendez remembered. “The draft was breathing down hard on all our backs.” Pals from the South Bronx neighborhood where he now lived enlisted or were drafted into the marines, the air force, and the army. “My neighbor, Pedro, came back in a body bag with his tags on his big toe. . . . It just didn’t make sense. Was there any reason for him to die? The news on the TV, the radio, or the papers did not provide a good answer to that question.” Over the course of a decade, thousands of New Yorkers would serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam War. As was true nationally, their ranks were disproportionately filled with the poor, the undereducated, and men and boys of color, as deferments shielded most college students from the draft. By the time the war was over, 1,741 New Yorkers had been killed in Southeast Asia. To Melendez’s friends, “War was not popular. Neither was defeat.” Such ambivalence—a mix of fear, grief, anger, patriotism, and unwillingness to see the United States lose the conflict—was more widespread than one might glean from the public protests and media coverage that sought neatly to split Americans into antiwar and pro-war camps. 45