We were marching along three sides of the White House, STEPS TO PEACE, STOP THE BOMBINGS, flanked by the wrought iron fence surrounding the lawn and the wooden police barricades set up to bisect the wide sidewalk, RESPECT 1954 GENEVA ACCORDS, the police watching with a faint air of familiar boredom, apparently without any sense of impending trouble, “NO MORE WAR, WAR NEVER AGAIN” — POPE PAUL, no one chanting or singing, even the militants looking oddly suppressed save for the anticipatory fire in their eyes and the color of the now unfurled Vietcong flags, when suddenly the storm troopers appeared in Army fatigues and combat boots, swastika armbands on their shirtsleeves, George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi elite, one of whom held in his right hand a fire-engine red can with the label GAS on it, and in his left hand a sign reading FREE GASOLINE AND MATCHES FOR PEACE CREEPS.
The reference, of course, was to the two immolations within as many weeks this November, the first having taken place outside the river entrance to the Pentagon, not three miles from where we now marched, when a thirty-one-year-old Quaker named Norman Morrison drenched his clothes with gasoline and, holding his eighteen-month-old daughter in his arms, set fire to himself in protest against the Vietnam War. An Army major managed to grab the child away from him in time, but Morrison could not be saved, and he was declared dead on arrival at the Fort Meyer Army Dispensary. A week later, a twenty-two-year-old Roman Catholic named Roger LaPorte set himself ablaze outside the United Nations building in New York City, and died some thirty-three hours later, still in coma. The immensity of those gestures, ill-advised or otherwise, coupled with the memory of Jews being incinerated by Nazis in the all-too-recent past (Judgment at Nuremburg had taken two Academy Awards not five years ago!) transformed this American Nazi’s at best insensitive offer into an act at once barbaric and intolerable. It was no surprise that someone rushed him, yanked the armband from his shirtsleeve, and began tearing his poster to shreds. (The surprise came later; his attacker turned out to be an ex-Marine who, like the Nazi, was opposed to the march.)
I expected trouble to erupt full-blown then and there.
I saw another Nazi rushing forward with a poster that read IN WAR, THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR VICTORY, wielding the sign like a baseball bat, Vietcong flags on poles being lowered like spears now, a minor war paradoxically about to begin on the fringes of a protest against war. There was a lunatic aspect to the scene, the row of orderly marchers with their beautifully rendered posters, a middle-aged phalanx that circled the White House in the company of a sparse number of Utes, while Vietcong flags confronted Nazi swastikas, schizophrenia in the sunshine, the Washington police seemingly as dazed as the photographers, but only for a moment. Swiftly, efficiently, they moved in to break up the scuffle. Flash bulbs popped too late. My head was turned away, there was no danger that a recognizable photograph of me would appear on the front page of the New York Times. (Was this in my mind even then, the persistent rumor that draft boards were deliberately calling up peace demonstrators in reprisal, was this what caused my apprehension?)
We marched across the Mall later to the Washington Monument and listened to speeches gently urging peace. Looking north across Constitution Avenue, we could see the White House, and to the southwest across the Tidal Basin, the glittering white temple of the Jefferson Memorial. I did not know what to think. President Johnson had only yesterday affirmed through his Press Secretary Bill D. Moyers that the anti-war demonstrations were “a part of the freedom guaranteed all Americans.” But Moyers had gone on to say that the President was “obviously impressed also by the other kind of demonstrations taking place in South Vietnam where tens of thousands of Americans were serving their country and offering themselves in support of freedom.” Johnson seemed certain that the great majority of Americans were in favor of his Vietnam policy (but not the many thousands who were gathered here at the monument) and he had delivered through Moyers what sounded ominously like a warning to those of us who were opposed to the policy there, asking us again to “weigh the consequences” of our actions. I did not feel we were accomplishing too terribly much as we listened to the speeches. I felt a sense of helplessness, a certain knowledge that however many of us rose in protest against what Norman Thomas later called “this monstrously stupid chess game in which the pawns bleed,” no matter how many of us made our views known and our voices heard, the course had already been charted; there were empires at stake of which we had no inkling.
All the way back to Talmadge, I could not shake my gloomy despair nor my edgy apprehension.
The Talmadge Advertiser-Dispatch published only two editions a week, one on Monday and the other on Thursday. Since the march had taken place on a Saturday, the earliest mention of it could only have appeared on the following Monday.
It was my father who brought the item to my attention. He had told my mother that he wanted to speak to me, and when I went into the living room, he was sitting in one of the Hogarth chairs flanking the fireplace. I took the chair opposite him. A pitcher of martinis was on the end table near his right elbow. It was nearly empty, and he was holding an almost-drained glass in his hand. I hoped he was not drunk.
“How come we never have heart-to-heart talks?” he asked.
“I don’t know. How come?” I answered.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to go see all the Andy Hardy movies — you ever hear of Andy Hardy?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Old Judge Hardy would take Andy into the library for these heart-to-heart talks, and they would get things all squared away. I used to wish my father would take me into the library and have one of those talks with me, but he never did. We used to have a library upstairs in the house on East Scott, well, you’ve never seen that house, you wouldn’t know. It was a nice room. I’m sorry we never used it. I mean, to talk.”
I didn’t say anything.
“This is a nice room, too,” my father said, “though of course not a library. Your mother’s got good taste. This is a nice room, don’t you think?”
“Yes, it’s a very nice room,” I said. “I’ve always liked it.”
“Shall we have a heart-to-heart talk?”
“About what?”
“I try to be a good father,” he said suddenly.
Again, I said nothing.
“Did you see this?” he asked and handed me a copy of the Advertiser-Dispatch folded open to page four. I was surprised to see my high school graduation picture there, with a caption over it that read:
The single paragraph under the picture merely stated that I was one of an estimated thirty-five thousand protesters who had gone to Washington the week before.
“Is this today’s?” I said. Idiotically, all I could think was TALMADGE UTE MARCHES.
“You didn’t tell me you were going to Washington.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“Do I have to ask?”
“I guess if you’re interested, you have to ask.”
“No, I don’t have to ask. A father doesn’t have to ask his own son what he’s up to. You’re supposed to come to me and tell me. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“Pop,” I said, “maybe we ought to talk some other time.”
“No, let’s talk now.”
“Dinner’s almost ready...”
“Dinner can wait!”
“How many of those have you had?”