The children's campaign

...As a last and only resort, the kid who knew now from practice how to telephone the White House, called to see if the letters could be accepted at the White House mailroom that very evening...

...But their strongest thoughts were fixed on the...

...Except for the intervention of their fellow-Vermonter, the government had been consistently remote in its dealings with them...

...No gate or door to the White House had opened for them, and it was to the heart of the White House itself that they wanted their composite message to reach...

...In the last week of the campaign, and for the two mail delivery days following, an average of three hundred letters came into the home office each day...

...Perhaps because they're not far themselves from the age of schoolyard pranks, certainly because they had the world's most important business in their hands, they let the annoyance dry off in the warm afternoon sun, and went on with the reading...

...05667: June 1, 1982...

...After months of futile correspondence with the White House, and, in the week before the great day in Washington, almost daily phone conversations with a concerned senior policy adviser of Reagan's (concerned in part because he, too, was from Vermont, the state from which most of the organizers hailed), the White House informed the children on the morning of the letter-reading that Thelma Duggin, the White House liaison for youth would officially receive their letters at 1 P.M...

...The startled man won a round of applause from the kids, who were relieved that from the blank wall of government, someone had emerged with a face and voice and hands, who was taking notice of them...

...The dauntless CCNDers, dazed by their hours in the eye of the world, dazed by what they had dared and, by golly, done, let everything go, including the last shreds of solemnity, and read off, by turns and in chorus, up and down, in the spirit of the multiple colors in which they were written, the names of the hundred kids from Bolinas who had taken the time and trouble and had the trust to send their message across the country to improbable Vermont, for an even more improbable trip six hundred miles south to the president's very doorstep...

...the signatures below were all kids' pleasure, exuberant in the color of felt-tip markers and the kind of signature-flourishes that appear on graffiti and kids' sport-jackets...

...The main work of the campaign was carried on by the five remaining young women, aged twelve, fourteen, fifteen, fifteen, nineteen...

...The twenty-two-year-old, an elder figure, attended just that one meeting and dropped out...

...They felt that the significance of their work and of the consolidated viewpoints of 2800 kids across the country was being acknowledged...

...They seemed suspicious of sidewalk encounters, and lacking in old-fashioned Hyde Park curiosity...

...They had been advised to send just one person in...

...some of them had made five months earlier to bring a children's argument for nuclear disarmament to the door of the White House...

...Helen Caldicott, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility...

...They didn't linger when the soup was finished...

...Like her, they had become persuaded of the great and possibly terminal danger we all live in while the two great powers play at the nuclear arms race on the world's chess board...

...Kids not-in the reading groups held up the signs, while other kids distributed a leaflet, whose text was completed by some of the organizers on the drive down from New j England...

...scroll, with a brief appeal at the top to President Reagan to quit the nuclear arms race, and the signatures of more than a hundred kids below...

...Postscript...

...By indirect paths these young people were disciples of Dr...

...At the same time, he continued," we must begin to find ways to bring about verifiable reductions in armaments, so that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union will represent a threat to the other...

...Yes, they could, and the kids loaded up Mr...

...The public sidewalk in front of the White House had become as much theirs as anyone else's in the land...

...They would spend another day, Friday, on radio interviews and calls to the press to inform them about Saturday's doings at the White House...

...There were a lot of reporters and cameras on hand for the meeting between Ms...

...The message on top was written in heavy black ink in a fine calligrapher's hand...

...The kids were worried about the effect of all the work that had gone to make the day...

...So the letters went out of the kids' hands, into the hands of the president's unknown proxies...

...But just two minutes before the appointed time, another woman came out of the White House to inform the children that Thelma Duggin would not appear, because of the presence of cameras...

...It was cold enough to produce shivers...

...She said it as confidently as if she had counted how many drops it takes to fill a bucket, and with one in and only a million to go, there was hope after all for our side of the world...

...He went on to say that no one in this country wants to prevent nuclear war as much as he does, and that the government is working to strengthen our defenses, which he considers to be essential to the preservation of peace...

...moral insup-portability of any shred of nuclear threat or act...

...An observant Swiss visitor noticed that of the people who stopped briefly to listen, many left as soon as the child-reader came to the word "nuclear...

...The remaining kids, with a fine sense of political drama, lined up in a single file, twenty to twenty-five of them, carrying the signs they had used throughout the day, and displaying dozens of manila envelopes, filled with the letters for President Reagan, and freshly inscribed with the president's name...

...The Children's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was born in Plainfield, Vermont in May, 1981, in the course of an all-day, meeting of six lifelong friends, aged twelve to twenty-two, from Boston, Maine, and Vermont, some of whom had been writing back and forth during the previous year about theirfears of a nuclear holocaust...

...If the civics lessons the kids learn in school are sound, they had succeeded in quietly putting their one drop in the bucket...

...They were finally Doing It, practicing the venerated right of free speech at the very doorstep of the nation's most powerful man, after five months of preparation...

...As those who weren't reading milled around, discussing what they should do, an odd thing happened...

...The kids were disappointed but not surprised...

...It was as cold now as it had been at 8 in the morning...

...The nineteen-year-old became a member emerita following the Washington action...

...It was from Bolinas, California, a 2Vi x 6 ft...

...On the basis of trial readings, they figured that they'd need close to thirty hours to read every letter...

...They had looked up the First Amendment to the Constitution, and knew they had the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances . . . and to have their petition received and considered...

...EXERCISING THE RIGHT OF PETITION The children's campaign JULES RABIN A few minutes before 8 A. M., on a bright, cold Saturday morning in October, two big vans bearing Vermont icense plates, and a small car with Maine plates pulled up in front of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue, and let out a couple of dozen kids who were fulfilling a pledge JULES RABIN, the father of some of the children described in the article above, lives in Vermont...

...Just a month after their day in front of the White House, the children received a letter from President Reagan in which he expressed his regret at the difficulty they encountered in trying to deliver to the White House the many letters they had gathered...

...since it is wide and broad, they planned to set up several teams there of three kids each, with a reader at the center of each team, and a helper on either side: They felt an unspoken compact with the hundreds, and ultimately thousands, of kids who had written: every letter would be beamed out in an attentive and respectful voice to the presence in the White House...

...Their experienced White House negotiator came out a few minutes later with Mr...

...One child, in a radio interview, had assessed the work of the campaign organizers and the thousands of kids who had written letters as "a drop in the bucket...

...By mid-morning, they had got over their initial nervousness...

...Besides the facts of the kids' five-months-long campaign and their views on nuclear war, there was a small piece of current news to share with the press...

...Duggin and the kids...

...Weeks before, they had obtained a police permit to hold their letter-reading in front of the White House...

...The trickle of letters coming in since the end of the first campaign gives them a headstart of over one thousand letters...

...The children came with winter jackets, a dozen signs ("We are Scared," "God Put Us Here for Peace," "Don't Destroy the Only World"), 2500 leaflets, and the fruit of their five months of hard work: 2800 letters from kids in thirty-eight states, who wanted to let President Reagan know how they felt about a future menaced by the impersonal wager of our nuclear diplomacy...

...The first readers sounded tense, from the cold and the nervousness of performing a public act in that extraordinary place...

...They walked along the broad sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, now deserted at the supper hour, in a quiet procession observed by practically no one, and around the corner of 17th Street to the Executive Office Building entrance...

...Most of the morning of the reading there were more kids on the sidewalk than Washingtonians or tourists...

...All the kids met on Pennsylvania Avenue, for a sidewalk supper of hot soup and bread, one of half a dozen meals prepared for them by the Washington peace community...

...That message from the White House had heartened the kids...

...For the most part, passersby didn't linger to hear what the kids were saying...

...The "home office," managed in the last weeks of the campaign by the twelve-year-old, was actually a corner of the kitchen of two of the original organizers: a home-made desk and two sets of shelves made of crates from the Reddy Safety Pin Co...

...A White House policy was cited, which forbade the appearance of officials when there were cameras around...

...They had considered the size of the sidewalk...

...Buckler and two of their own with dozens of packed manila envelopes, for delivery into the building...

...A SIDEWALK press conference had been called for 1:30 in the afternoon...

...The five original organizers had been invited to attend a day of rich briefing on Capitol Hill, before the day of the letter-reading (with Senator Leahy, an aide of Senator Cranston, Herbert Scoville of the Arms Control Association, and two disarmament specialists from the Library of Congress...

...The great reading began promptly at 8 A.M...

...a nice face and a nice voice, at that...

...Kids, lunches, and letters were moistened, and the whole operation had to be moved to a dry portion of the sidewalk...

...Buckler of the White House mailroom...

...The kids have run the whole campaign themselves, accepting the collaboration of adults as "pages, messengers, and chauffeurs," as one said, asking for advice when they felt they needed it, and accepting unsolicited advice reluctantly, in the cases where it made sense to them...

...The kids didn't make much of the occurrence, though they minded their letters getting wet...

...And on Friday in Washington another Vermont contingent arrived with kids and almost one thousand more letters...

...THE PUBLIC READING of the 2800 letters was finished, and evening was coming on...

...And if the Bolinas kids wrote from a Catholic school, their eminent place in the day's doings was doubly deserved, because Catholic schools were responsible for an imposingly large fraction of all the letters received...

...Now it occurred to the guardians of that precious drop that it could disappear without a trace in the great shuffle of the president's faceless establishment...

...Yes, the mailroom could be reached through a side door of the Executive Office Building, around the corner...

...They had be'come proficient in the arithmetic of kilotonnage and megatonnage, the casualties of the little Hiroshima bomb, and the millionfold magnification of the original bomb's power in the world's nuclear arsenals...

...It was fitting that the kids saved for last and best a letter from California because in proportion to its population, great California had sent perhaps five times more letters than any other state of the thirty-eight that spoke up...

...Throughout most of the morning, three or four teams of kids at a time carried on the reading, their backs to the traffic of Pennsylvania Ave., their faces and voices turned towards the White House...

...Buckler had to duck into the Executive Office building for what proved to be a final White House decision precipitated by the kids' actions: could all those manila envelopes containing the thousands of letters addressed to President Reagan be accepted without additional postage...

...The letters in hand amounted to forty-five child-hours of reading time...

...The sprinklers close to the margin of the White House lawn were turned on, sending a spray through the fence and onto the adjacent portion of the sidewalk...

...They went home satisfied that they had...

...At 5:30 P.M., an hour on Saturday when the sidewalk in front of the White House is almost deserted, and, in October, chill comes back to the street, the children reached the letter which they had held for last...

...The children have decided to launch a second-letter-writing campaign (closing date for sending letters to CCND, Box 550, R.D.I, Plainfield, Vt...

...of Montpelier, Vt...

...Towards mid-morning, the chill dissipated, and the kids reversed the pattern of the first hours, moving out of the sun into the shade...

...The organizers of the Children's Campaign did considerable homework in preparation for their day in Washington...