New York at War (50 page)

At Columbia, too, the two cities confronted each other. There, an ad hoc conservative student group calling itself the Majority Coalition sought to hinder the radicals during the April 1968 crisis. Among the counterprotesters were law student George Pataki, future Republican governor of New York, and William Barr, later to become George H. W. Bush’s attorney general; other members of the coalition were athletes on Columbia’s sports teams. By the spring of 1968, the two sides were in a state of barely contained warfare on campus; the previous year SDS members and conservative students traded punches at an antiwar rally after exchanging their favorite epithets. “Fucking jock,” the radicals had taunted; “Commie puke,” the “jocks” had returned. “Just looking at these dirty, bearded twerps with their sneers and their sloppy girlfriends is enough to make a guy vomit,” one conservative student commented. Conservatives were further enraged when radical female students taunted police by shouting, “Go fuck yourself, you pig,” and other obscenities.
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Beneath the mutual animosity lay a set of class and cultural differences that placed young conservatives and police on one side of the divide and radical students on the other. After the Columbia sit-in, one policeman commented, “Everything I got in life I worked for. It gets me sore when I see these kids, who been handed everything, pissing it away, talking like bums, dressing like pigs.” “We’re Staten Island. They’re Scarsdale,” one young conservative explained. The “jocks” felt looked down upon by those they considered spoiled, arrogant subversives. The “pukes,” frustrated at their failure to arouse working-class whites against the war and the system, resented their adversaries’ quick resort to the fist. Given the intensity of their skirmishes, it seemed only a matter of time before these two New Yorks would collide in full force.
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Majority Coalition members (left) and student radicals fight at Columbia University, April 29, 1968. © BETTMANN / CORBIS.

On May 8, 1970, several hundred antiwar protesters, many of them students from New York University, Hunter College, and city high schools, marched down Broadway in protest against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia a week earlier and the killing of four demonstrators by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio on May 4. Their placards demanded the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam and Cambodia, and the termination of military research by local universities. Their destination was the intersection of Broad and Wall Streets, between the Federal Hall National Monument, the site of George Washington’s presidential inauguration in 1789, and the New York Stock Exchange—fitting symbols of the connections between the government’s war and American capitalism. Many sat on the steps of Federal Hall, around Washington’s statue, listening as speakers denounced the war.

Shortly before noon, the demonstrators heard chants—“All the way, U.S.A.” and “Love it or leave it”—and saw American flags approaching above a sea of yellow hard hats. Two hundred construction workers from nearby worksites, including the World Trade Center project, converged around them. Some Wall Street workers out on their lunch break joined the counterdemonstrators. Within minutes, the hard hats had charged the steps of Federal Hall, sweeping away a thin line of police. “Kill the Commie bastards,” some shouted. As students tried to dart away, the construction workers swatted at them with their helmets and pummeled them with their fists. At Exchange Place, Robert Bernhard, a Lehman Brothers partner, tried to shield a young man from attack, only to be slammed against a telephone pole himself. When another man tried to help Bernhard, a construction worker gashed the man’s head with a pair of pliers. “These people are rampaging but the police are not arresting them,” Michael Berknap, a lawyer and Democratic candidate for the state senate, told a reporter after he had been beaten and kicked. The hard hats next turned to Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street, which had become a makeshift hospital for injured students. Workers ripped down a Red Cross banner and tried to do the same to the flag of the Episcopal Church. “I suppose they thought it was a Vietcong flag,” deadpanned Trinity’s rector, the Reverend John Vernon Butler.
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The hard hats’ final target was City Hall, ten blocks up Broadway. There, Mayor Lindsay had ordered the American flag flown at half mast in memory of the four Kent State martyrs. One group veered off to smash windows at Pace University on Park Row, where students on a rooftop were taunting them and throwing debris down on them. But the main body crowded the front steps of City Hall, demanding that the flag be raised to full staff. A mailman got to the roof and raised the flag, to cheers from below. Lindsay was uptown at Gracie Mansion, but his aide Sid Davidoff went out on the roof and lowered the flag again. A furious roar and chants of “Lindsay’s a Red” erupted from City Hall Park as hard hats tried to push past fifteen police officers into the building. Fearing total chaos, the police persuaded Deputy Mayor Richard Aurelio to have the flag raised again. The workers sang “The Star Spangled Banner,” burned a peace banner seized from Pace students, and went back to their construction sites.
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The so-called hard hat riot of Bloody Friday left at least seventy people, mostly peace demonstrators, injured. Three days later, two thousand pro-war marchers rallied again in lower Manhattan. Most were construction workers and longshoremen. They carried flags and placards reading “Impeach the Red Mayor” and “We Support Nixon and Agnew.” At Pace University, they yelled up to watching students, “Don’t worry, they don’t draft faggots.” Once more, several peace demonstrators, including a student who flashed the two-fingered peace sign, were beaten. But this time, with the police out in force, fewer were injured; four marchers were arrested, and police acted quickly to get between the flag carriers and students on Centre Street, whom Homer Bigart of the
New York Times
watched as they shouted “obscene antiwar chants.” The hard hats, however, were not done. On May 20, some hundred thousand “hawks,” organized by Peter Brennan of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York, converged peacefully on City Hall Park to “show love of country and love and respect for our country’s flag.” Sympathizers rained ticker tape down on them from office windows. Some marchers briefly hung an effigy of Lindsay from a Murray Street lamppost.
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President Nixon rewarded Brennan for his support by making him secretary of labor in 1973. The war had already divided New York’s labor movement. In a fiery speech, Victor Gotbaum of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees denounced “a godforsaken war . . . that has turned brother against brother,” and blasted American backing for the corrupt Thieu regime in South Vietnam, which “has turned Saigon into a vast whorehouse,” just as fervently as Brennan declaimed that “we are supporting the boys in Vietnam and President Nixon.” Far from the street rallies, Vietnam had become an issue in the city’s worksites and union halls.
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The broader meaning of the hard hat riot and its aftermath was to make visible the anger, power, and numbers of the conservative “Silent Majority” in the most liberal city in the country. The hundred thousand marchers—harbingers of the blue-collar “Reagan Democrats,” who a decade later would transform American politics—were a warning omen both to urban liberals in Lindsay’s camp and to student radicals who viewed the war as a lever for revolution. Watching the flag-waving workers parade by on May 20, Cliff Sloane, a University of Michigan freshman from Brooklyn, pondered the implications. “If this is what the class struggle is all about,” he told a
New York Times
reporter, “there’s something wrong somewhere.”
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The war, and the movement against it, slogged on into the early 1970s. The stalwarts continued their marches, but Nixon’s mixed strategy of bombing, negotiating with the North Vietnamese leadership in Hanoi, covert operations against domestic militants, and “Vietnamization” (gradually bringing American troops home and leaving the South Vietnamese to fight their own war) had its intended effect of blunting the interest of millions of moderates in the antiwar movement. Yet the activists’ achievements were significant. The nationwide antiwar moratorium demonstration of October 15, 1969, followed by the November 15 march of half a million on Washington, which New York organizer Norma Becker helped to orchestrate, had given the president pause. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, had planned a major escalation of the war, with massive bombing, mining, and a ground invasion of North Vietnam, and had even discussed the use of tactical nuclear weapons. But “after all the protests and the Moratorium,” Nixon himself later wrote, “American public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war,” and the plan was shelved.
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Between 1964 and 1973, protesters numbering several dozen to over one hundred thousand had taken to New York’s streets and parks in at least forty-three major antiwar demonstrations; they had also engaged in scores of smaller rallies, meetings, teach-ins, sit-ins, and acts of civil disobedience. Tens of thousands had repeatedly journeyed to Washington and points all over the country to bear witness against a war they felt to be unwise and immoral. Members of the city’s congressional delegation, including Bella Abzug, Ed Koch, Elizabeth Holtzman, and Herman Badillo had become recognized national figures in opposition to the war. When Saigon finally fell to North Vietnamese forces, fifty thousand people gathered in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow on May 11, 1975, to listen to Joan Baez, Odetta, Phil Ochs, Harry Belafonte, Richie Havens, Paul Simon, and others celebrate the coming of peace. Despite the disagreements that had divided their efforts, and the continuing murderous turmoil that the conflict had brought to Cambodia, they could find momentary unity under the event’s banner and balloons, which read, “THE WAR IS OVER!”
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The post-Vietnam era brought new commitments for the New Yorkers who had marched, rallied, and protested throughout the war. Former students settled into careers; many moved on from political activism altogether. But others found meaning in a new—or rather an old—cause: the antinuclear fight. This took the form of opposition to the dangers of nuclear power plants but also to the international proliferation of atomic weapons. True, the immediate local threat seemed to subside. The Nike missile bases around cities had been stepped down; the New York area’s last installations, six in New York and four in New Jersey, were deactivated in 1974. Helicopters carried the nuclear warheads away; a few disarmed missiles remained at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, eventually becoming a National Parks Service exhibit on the history of the Cold War.

What had not subsided was Washington’s commitment to a nuclear arsenal as a presumed deterrent against Communist aggression. Rather than Nike missile sites scattered around major cities, silos armed with offensive and defensive nuclear intercontinental missiles had sprouted across the Great Plains states starting in 1959. Out of sight, out of mind; to antinuclear activists, the remoteness of these warheads lulled Americans into thinking their cities and suburbs were safe from annihilation.

The Reagan administration’s reescalation of Cold War tensions in the early 1980s brought old issues full-circle. FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency), the successor to Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s FCDA, followed Reagan’s directive to “provide for the survival of a substantial portion of the U.S. population” in the event of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Suburbanites once more were encouraged to dig up their backyards for protection. “Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top,” T. K. Jones of the Defense Department advised Americans. “It’s the dirt that does it.”
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For the cities, FEMA drafted “crisis relocation” plans: 150 million Americans would be expected to move to “low-risk rural areas” fifty to three hundred miles from their homes. “Sure, it’ll be a hell of a mess . . . ,” FEMA official Louis Guiffrida admitted in 1982. “It boggles the mind. But do we just throw up our hands and say, ‘Forget it, the job’s too big?’” Other government agencies toed the line. “Victory in a nuclear war will belong to the country that recovers first,” a Federal Reserve System booklet intoned. To help maintain the postattack economy, Federal Reserve banks would still try to clear all checks, “including those drawn on destroyed banks.” The nightmarish prognostications of the 1950s had returned, only with far more powerful warheads.
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Reagan’s initiatives energized the antinuclear movement. For Norma Becker, Cora Weiss, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, and thousands of others now engaged in that movement, the imperative to forestall World War III had always been a key aim of their opposition to the Vietnam War. Jonathan Schell’s best-selling 1982 book,
The Fate of the Earth
, measured the dire realities of nuclear brinkmanship by describing the imagined results of a twenty-megaton Soviet bomb, 1,600 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, exploding six miles above the Empire State Building: “people caught in the open twenty-three miles away from ground zero, in Long Island, New Jersey, and southern New York State, would be burned to death. . . . The mushroom cloud would be seventy miles in diameter. New York City and its suburbs would be transformed into a lifeless, flat, scorched desert in a few seconds.”
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