THE POWER OF POLITICAL PROTEST
PROGRESSIVE The Power of Political Protest Shortly after his impressive triumph in the Wisconsin Presidential primary race, Senator Eugene J. McCarthy mused over the meaning of the extraordinary...
...PROGRESSIVE The Power of Political Protest Shortly after his impressive triumph in the Wisconsin Presidential primary race, Senator Eugene J. McCarthy mused over the meaning of the extraordinary response he had evoked in both New Hampshire and Wisconsin...
...Protest showed itself in teach-ins, in sit-ins, in pray-ins...
...it expressed itself in picketing, petitions, and demonstrations...
...Johnson," said the New Statesman of London, "that nothing in his Presidency became him like the leaving it"—if indeed he is leaving it...
...The power of political protest has carried us a long way this momentous month...
...President Johnson's decision to order a reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam as the first step in a major peace offensive—and Hanoi's affirmative response—came as the brightest sparkle of hope in the long agony of the Vietnam war...
...What Senator McCarthy was saying was that in the midst of the gravest crisis confronting this country in a century, democracy does work when men's minds are liberated by leadership committed to holding out affirmative alternatives to prevailing policies of defeat and despair...
...Mr...
...This is precisely what President Johnson was responding to that historic evening of March 31 when he went before the country to renounce another quest for the Presidency and to announce a major reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam...
...it was not until the eve of the Wisconsin Presidential primary, which his aides told Mr...
...We are setting free the intelligence and good will of this country," the Senator said...
...What Senator McCarthy was saying, too, was that despite all the surface evidence of bitter strife and explosive frustration in the nation, there is enough latent good-will to unite the country once it acquires forward-looking leadership and develops positive programs for peace at home and abroad...
...The polls steadily showed the extent to which the political capital he had banked in his landslide victory in 1964 was being depleted...
...Friends who have called on the President since his grand renunciation report that his conversations disclosed an obsessive anxiety about how history will deal with him, and the wistful hope that now that he has renounced another term and set in motion the wheels toward peace, the strife and bitterness and disunion of the past few years may not loom so large in the ultimate evaluation of the man and his Presidency...
...It was not until Senator McCarthy rallied and united all the forces of dissent—except the far-out extremists—into a political movement...
...This is the step The Progressive has urged on President Johnson for three years as the only key that would unlock the door to negotiations...
...Johnson's landslide triumph in 1964, protest has been multiplying at a geometric progression...
...We would urge, too, even if the prospects are not bright, that at the preliminary talks 4 American negotiators confront the representatives of North Vietnam—and through them the all-important National Liberation Front—with the urgent appeal for an immediate cease-fire by both sides so the senseless slaughter can stop sooner than later...
...In its affirmative aspect, it can carry us on to peace itself if we continue to demand a political settlement based on the hard facts of life in Vietnam today...
...This reflective comment was characteristically restrained and as characteristically charged with the kind of subtle significance that sometimes eludes newsmen seeking a statement with enough clout to make headlines...
...The road ahead is long and tortuous...
...Secretary-General U Thant, the Pope, leading Senate doves, and a number of world statesmen have long contended was the indispensable first move toward peace...
...But even if the United States agrees to take this first step—and agree we must—the problems awaiting the negotiators at the peace table will be staggering...
...For three years, indeed since shortly after Mr...
...We plan to explore the problems—and the possibilities for peace—• in an early issue...
...History may say of Mr...
...Hanoi's willingness to talk was confined to first-round discussion of its demand for complete and unconditional cessation of the bombing and "all other acts of war" against North Vietnam, but even this first modest step electrified a war-worried world...
...It was also the master stroke of a master politician whose house was crumbling all around him...
...Johnson's March 31 performance was a magnanimous move to rally his bitterly divided country in a moment of almost unparalleled crisis...
...This is the step that U.N...
...Johnson he would lose by a humiliating margin to peace candidate McCarthy—it was not until these political developments that the President chose the moment to announce: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President...
...But to the master politician in the White House, protest became meaning"Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free*' ful only when it became political...
...But still the protest was random, formless, and leaderless...
...it was not until McCarthy's New Hampshire showing exposed the depth and breadth of dissent...
...Escalation of the war in 1965, which came as a repudiation of the President's campaign pledges, brought millions of Americans into open protest of the war policies of the man they had just elected by a record margin...
...The politicians in the precincts on whom he had counted were expressing doubt and dismay...
...Senator McCarthy might have gone on to paraphrase Victor Hugo's classic observation that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come: There is nothing more powerful than a people's protest movement at the time it acquires able, articulate political leadership...
...See Ronnie Dagger's article, "As Mike Mansfield Was Saying—" on Page 14...
...At the moment, however, we feel it is imperative to place exclusive emphasis on the need for the United States to agree to unconditional cessation of the bombing...
...Sidney Lens reported in these pages last September that he was told by two Hanoi agents this was the only step needed to lead to peace talks...
...it was not until McCarthy's incredible vote in the Granite State brought Senator Robert Kennedy into the race...
...And it represented his personal appeal to history to record him as a great President and a great statesman...
...If President Johnson is genuinely determined to have a full-fledged peace conference to negotiate a political settlement of the war, he will have to agree to total and unconditional cessation of the bombing...
Vol. 32 • May 1968 • No. 5
