A Moratorium Wired to Stop the War (Page 2)

The Vietnam Moratorium

On April 29, 1969, a group of antiwar student body presidents and campus newspaper editors--led by David Hawk, a divinity student on leave from Union Theological Seminary active in Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign, who had recently refused military induction--met with top Nixon Administration officials Henry Kissinger and John Ehrlichman in the White House Situation Room. On their way out, the student leaders told the press, "We have to resume our efforts to stop the war, because these people aren't going to."

Meanwhile, Boston businessman Jerome Grossman proposed a series of short, monthly general strikes to "enable a broad segment of the American people to participate in a legal and traditional protest action which will have a painful effect upon all with power and influence."

Hawk and other activists quickly signed on to the idea of the escalating monthly actions, but to make them sound less confrontational they changed the label from a general strike to the Vietnam Moratorium. They opened an office in Washington and began tracking down hundreds of students leaders on summer vacation. Their plan was to roll out the first Moratorium on campuses October 15, then start recruiting in the surrounding communities for the second Moratorium a month later.

"Our strategy got blown out of the water, because it caught on like wildfire," Hawk said. Veteran peace activist Sidney Peck said the Moratorium "allowed people to express their opposition to the war in a way that was comfortable. It could be wearing an armband, it could be honking your horn, it could be leaving your lights on. No matter what your politics were, if you were against the war, here was a chance to express it."

The Moratorium won significant political support. Representative Morris Udall, who was running for Speaker of the House, told a Moratorium staffer who had asked for his endorsement, "I can do more if I'm Speaker, and I won't be Speaker if I do this." The next morning, Udall called the staffer back. "Look, I've thought about it overnight and haven't slept very much. What I said to you last night is fundamentally wrong. I ought to do what I think is the right thing to do, not what is...politically expedient. Use my name."

Millions of Americans in thousands of communities participated in the first Vietnam Moratorium Day. Everywhere it was different--candlelight processions, readings of the names of Americans killed in the war, church services, public meetings. White-coated doctors, dark-suited lawyers and young suburban mothers joined the protests. Life Magazine called it "a display without historical parallel, the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country."

A second Moratorium a month later coincided with a planned November 15 rally in Washington. Crowds estimated by the newspapers at 250,000 and by independent observers as nearly a million, streamed into Washington. Attorney General John Mitchell told his wife, "Looking out the Justice Department it looked like the Russian revolution."

By then, though, the leadership of the peace movement was splintering and the Moratorium movement was running out of steam. But in retrospect, some historians say it played a significant role in forestalling further escalation of the Vietnam War. Unbeknownst to those planning the Moratorium, Nixon was simultaneously planning Operation Duck Hook, which would include massive bombing of Hanoi, the mining of rivers and harbors, the bombing of dikes, a ground invasion of North Vietnam and perhaps even the use of nuclear weapons. According to Who Spoke Up?, a history of the anti-Vietnam War movement by Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, "The antiwar sentiment generated and aired in the fall of 1969 made it politically impossible for the President to proceed with his plan. As a result, thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese and American lives were spared."

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