On October 10 the White House attempted a distraction from the upcoming Moratorium, set for five days later. They announced a major policy address on Vietnam for November 3 - which announcement, if tradition held, would lead to columnists’ predictions that Nixon was about to announce a major disengagement. That same day the president announced the retirement of the hated General Lewis Hershey as head of the Selective Service Administration. On October 13 White House couriers pulled a kid out of class at Georgetown for a photo opportunity. Randy Dicks had written to the president about his September 26 press conference, “It has been my impression that it is not unwise for the President of the United States to make note of the will of the people.” Dicks was selected from thousands of letter-writers to hear back from the president, to show that he cared.

An NSC aide drafted Nixon’s response. Kissinger kept on tossing them back: “Make it more manly.”

The president ended up saying, “Whatever the issue, to allow the government policy to be made in the streets would destroy the democratic process.”

The press corps asked Randy Dicks what he thought of that. Not much, he said, before launching into a peroration about his indifference to “the democratic process”: monarchy, he said, “was the superior fom of government.”

The aides had carefully selected one undergrad. They had carelessly neglected to learn that he was president of something called the Student Monarchist Society.

On Moratorium Day, the aides recruited parachutists to touch down on the Mall and in Central Park, bearing American flags: perhaps the crowd would seize them, maybe burn them, and that would become the story. Instead, the crowds just laughed...

Two precisely incommensurate propositions: that either patience or impatience with the war was the road to national dishonor. On the fifteenth, the American people could vote on that referendum with their feet.

Richard Nixon lost. Life called it “the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country.” Two million Americans protested - most for the first time in their lives.

Everywhere, black armbands; everywhere, flags at half-staff; church services, film showings, teach-ins, neighbor-to-neighbor canvasses. In North Newton, Kansas, a bell tolled every four seconds, each clang memorializing a fallen soldier; in Columbia, Maryland, an electronic sign counted the day’s war deaths. Milwaukee staged a downtown noontime funeral procession. Hastings College, an 850-student Presbyterian school in Nebraska, suspended operations. Madison, Ann Arbor, and New Haven were only a few of the college towns to draw out a quarter of their populations or more (New Haven’s Vietnam Moratorium Committee had called up every name in the city phone book). The nation’s biggest college town brought out one hundred thousand souls in Boston Common. A young Rhodes Scholar out of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, got up a demonstration of one thousand people in front of the U.S. embassy in London. Newsday publisher and former LBJ right-hand man Bill Moyers, Paris peace talks chief negotiator Averell Harriman, the mayor of Detroit, even the Connecticut state chairman of Citizens for Nixon-Agnew, participated in protests. The Washington Post drew a man-bites-dog conclusion: “Anti-Vietnam Views Unite Generations.”

Another public square was Wall Street, where some twenty thousand businessmen gathered for a procession to Trinity Church, where the cere- mony reminded communicants of Martin Luther King’s March on Washington. In midtown Manhattan, one hundred thousand marched to Bryant Park to hear Tony Randall, Lauren Bacall, Woody Allen, Shirley MacLaine, both Republican New York senators, and Mayor Lindsay, who draped City Hall with black crepe and ordered all city flags flown at half-staff. The lowly New York Mets were up two games to one against the mighty Baltimore Orioles going into the fourth game of the World Series at Shea Stadium - where the flag was also flying half-staff. People darted in and out of taverns to check the score. At Columbia, Jimmy Breslin reported what the day’s starting pitcher, Tom Seaver, had told him, “If the Mets can get to the World Series, the U.S. can get out of Vietnam.”

And then there was Washington, D.C. On the evening of the fourteenth, twenty-three congressmen began an intended all-night session on Vietnam on the House floor. Gerald Ford managed to shut them down after four hours. It was the longest time Congress had ever talked Vietnam at a stretch. The next day, congressmen vigiled on the Capitol steps. At lunchtime, bureaucrats at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare could choose from twelve different antiwar discussions. Or they could simply play hooky, joining the fifty thousand who gathered at the base of the Washington Monument listening to Coretta Scott King say that this war was “destroying the very fabric and fiber of our society.”

Then, in ranks of ten, they moved out to the White House. There wasn’t a single Vietcong flag in evidence. There were hardly any signs at all. There were candles. Shimmering in an unbroken line all the way back to the Washington Monument… An NSC staffer took a break from working on the president’s November 3 speech on Vietnam to witness the flickering encirclement of the White House. He looked up with a start; it included his wife and children. The president affected to have noticed nothing “I haven’t seen a single demonstrator – and I’ve been out.”

Another public square was the nation’s high schools. At over a thousand, students boycotted classes. In Blackwood, New Jersey, Craig Badiali, president of the drama society, and his girlfriend, Joan Fox, a cheerleader, chose Moratorium day to borrow the Badiali family sedan and turn it into a carbon monoxide chamber: “Why – because we / love our fellow / man enough to / sacrifice our lives / so that they will / Try to find the ectasy in just being alive.”