Protests: And Now the Vietnik

A ragtag collection of the unshaven and unscrubbed — they could be called Vietniks — turned out last weekend to promote the most popular new anti-cause. Celebrating two grandly styled International Days of Protest, a nationwide series of demonstrations against U.S. policy in Viet Nam, they battered eardrums on campuses and street corners, but found in many cases that they were outnumbered and outshouted by supporters of their nation’s foreign policy.

The organization nominally behind the demonstrations is the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Viet Nam. A two-month-old shoe string operation headquartered near the University of Wisconsin at Madison, it produces a newsletter and claims a steering committee of 45 members who represent local end-the-war groups. The chairman, at $25 a week, is Frank Emspak, 22, who obtained his zoology degree at Wisconsin this year. His deputy is Ray Robinson Jr., 31, a bearded former prizefighter and civil rights worker who got an undesirable discharge from the Navy. Explains Robin son: “They said I couldn’t adjust.”

Eggs & Red Paint. On the whole, the Vietnik rallies — which also attracted some tweedy faculty members and clean-cut non-beats — seemed to bear out a Senate Internal Security Subcommittee report issued last week. While most members of the protest movement are loyal Americans, it said, control of the movement has “clearly passed “into the hands of Communists and extremist elements who are openly sympathetic to the Viet Cong.”

Most of the demonstrators’ arguments should certainly comfort Peking and Hanoi. At Detroit’s Wayne University, Al Harrison, a young Negro “organizer,” cried: “You all got me and my kind in chains! We got no business fighting a yellow man’s war to save the white man.” Wayne History Professor Norman Pollack—predictably, his specialty is the 19th century—argued that “pockets of profits” kept the U.S. in the war. “If there were no Viet Nam,” said he, “the American Government would have to invent one.”

Slug for Slap. On some campuses, counter-protesters engaged in debates or separate rallies. In Detroit, the opposition sang The Star-Spangled Banner over and over, all but drowning out the Vietniks. In Chicago and Oakland, Calif., demonstrators were pelted with raw eggs, and cops broke up a few mild scuffles. The leading rank of 10,000 paraders in New York City got doused with red paint. Even pleaders for peace can become aggressive. At New Jersey’s Rutgers University, a hotbed of anti-Viet Nam sentiment (see preceding story), a middle-aged woman lightly slapped Biology Senior Alan Marain for abusing U.S. troops in Viet Nam, where her son is serving. So Marain, 21, slugged her in the face.

Most of the demonstrations were orderly. The biggest, nearly 12,000 strong, started from the University of California’s Berkeley campus, aimed to march 7½ miles to the Army Terminal in Oakland, but lacked a parade permit; police turned them back without incident after the first ½miles. Later, someone tossed a tear-gas bomb at the marchers in a Berkeley park.

Telegram to L.B.J. At the University of Michigan—birthplace of the teach-in idea—some 250 demonstrators organized a sit-in at Selective Service headquarters in Ann Arbor; 38, including five teachers, were arrested for trespassing. But from the same school, 2,057 students and teachers sent Lyndon Johnson a 32-ft.-long telegram saying they support his “efforts to bring about a viable peace in Viet Nam.”

At a recruiting center in lower Manhattan, a self-styled “Catholic pacifist” burned his draft card. Though willful destruction of a draft card is punishable by a five-year jail term under a recently enacted federal law, the student declared: “Christ would not have carried this card. Neither will I.” One spectator shouted at the unkempt crowd: “Get inside. It’s going to rain. You’ll get clean!”