Why?

Why was a demonstration and effective protest for you?

And why does it look in the film that we now see like kids being loud and police being me?

That's what you basically see And that's all that anybody really understands about these things.

Um, was this effective?

Was it fun?

Was it pleasant was good.

They look a certain way today.

I'm trying to get below it.

You look at them.

You see what looked to be kids having fun, A lot of hippie looking kids, Not a little bit a lot and police being mean and scary.

How do you remember it?

See, uh, the years off a protest were dramatic only because they had been preceded by so many years of quiet essence or acquiescence.

The noises that we made Justin coming together in large numbers in the middle sixties and making speeches over sound systems in in the great out of doors.

Uh, these scenes were impressive and, uh, dramatic only because they hadn't seen before been seen before.

And I think they they spun out their usefulness rather quickly so that as successive generations moved into the anti war movement, it became almost a psychological requirement that they find yet another step to take.

What, another demonstration?

Uh, the next one had to be bigger batter, Uh, and maybe inexorably, uh, the movement pushed and pulled itself towards more violent encounters in the same way that those forces in the society that opposed what we were doing also escalated towards violence.

The But they the impact off those demonstrations was never greater than with the 1965 march on Washington to protest the war.

Actually, there were two that year in April and another one in November.

The April 1, there were 30 or 40 or maybe 50,000 people.

Uh, something like that.

Same number, a few, maybe a few more.

10.

60,000 in November, Uh, the feeling that it had to be bigger.

Otherwise it would be a defeat, and the one after that had to be bigger.

Yet the mass mobilizations of 66 67 they all had to be bigger if they didn't get bigger than the other side would say.

Your movement isn't growing, you've crested your you've piqued your falling back.

So there was a constant sense that the demonstration, which had rather inexpensively made a big point in the beginning, uh, became more and more expensive as time went by requiring logger rhythmically greater numbers of people even toe hold par even to just keep they keep the momentum up.

And, uh, also as time went by and the debate about the war polarized people who had previously been indifferent or ignorant of their beliefs.

Uh, as sides began to be chosen up in a more rigorous and demanding way, uh, and as people worked out their views left and right and center uh, the level the temperature went up Also, more and more people were involved in the war itself.

There were steadily larger numbers of American troops going over to fight The Vietnam War is a lot of gangrenous, Carl.

And what I see in the footage I'm looking at, people are yelling at each other all the time.

I have a whole hour films of yelling described that time.

It seems to be very frustrating.

Everybody seems angry.

I remember it as being a period where people felt people in the in the youth movement against the war felt very much on the spot in a situation that was brand new and increasingly scary and serious.

I think it's odd, for one thing, that the American protest of the war in Vietnam had to be led by a student organization.

Where were the grown ups?

Well, they were there, but they were a long time getting their act together.

They were a long time showing up.

If they had showed up earlier and been a part of the thing from the beginning, I don't know that it would have ever had to become as bitter as it did.

But we basically had, ah, movement that was injected or that injected itself into a very grown up, very serious situation and yet was manned and directed by inexperienced people.

And each of the succeeding levels of inexperienced leadership taking over from the previous group felt obliged to come up with the new strategy, the new tactic, the new gesture, the new explanation that will get us over the next bit of horizon so that we go from being very much committed to Nonviolence in the period 64 65 two 1968 where the leadership goes over to the group that will become the weatherman who were committed almost on principle to escalating the level of struggle, making it more violent, carrying of violence to the culture and what was necessary now, these people thought, was the creation of of some kind of organization capable of operating underground outside the law.

The slogan was a line from one of Bob Dylan songs to live outside the law.

You must be honest.

The corollary of that for the weatherman organizer's was to be honest, you must live outside the law to be serious.

You must break the law of the of the imperial ist mother country.

So they started trying to teach them how to teach themselves how to do it.

And they know they didn't know how to do it.

They knew that they were half silly.

And that's why the peculiar quality of the weatherman phenomenon is that the weatherman, to a certain extent, laughed at themselves.

Of course, the laughter became tears.

Riel blood was shed, but one of the one of the weatherman kids who was killed in the townhouse explosion in 1970 uh, Terri Robbins was a great fan of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

You remember a movie about a couple of outlaws who for a long time can get away with anything.

They have so many cute tricks.

Suddenly there's a guy chasing them who they can't out.

Fox and the one Butch keeps saying to the other Sundance, looking back, Who are those guys?

Mingling of fear and admiration?

The weatherman felt the same thing.

Who are those guys?

They knew they had attracted the big shots.

The big boys were coming after them.

The ones that the weatherman would never be ableto out fox or outwit or outlast or out organized.

They knew they were done for.

They had a really quality of fatalism and death about them, but they thought they had to.

Nevertheless, they had to go ahead and do what they were doing, which came to building bombs.

Because legitimate politics had been destroyed by Amerika, spelled with a K legitimate politics had been destroyed by the outwardly legitimate system itself.

Scary.

Yeah, and it was scary to me and I was scary toe everybody I knew and a lot of us on the inside of the movement thought that it was the stupidest damn thing that we could come up with was the three idea of more violence, but I think that it for a while, the the feeling.

Waas It's like that cartoon where the big guy is saying, Let me at him, let me and let me at him and the or the little guy is saying that and the big guy sort of holding him back.

And we felt like that little guy who was saying, Let me at him, Let me at him.

Somebody was Our dad was holding us back.

He understood he would make sure that the scene didn't get out of hand.

But then they killed Martin Luther King and he killed Bobby Kennedy.

I say they that mystic, they your dad wasn't there anymore.

There was nobody to hold you back.

There was no front movement of grown ups who had probity and the the depth of understanding to keep the scene cooled out to the extent that it needed to be, and the youth movement was suddenly left alone with its rhetoric.

It's very fierce face making and an adversary who wasn't it all backwards about taking it to the mat.

If King had stayed alive, King would in some way have been a part of that, the civil rights movement and the anti war movement would have folded together behind a legitimate, grownup, responsible leadership with serious opportunities in the electoral political dimension.

And that's what would have happened.

They would.

Kennedy would have become the president.

I don't know if King would have come into his Cabinet or not, but he would have been somehow, ah, figure in official Washington.

The civil rights movement and the anti war movement would have succeeded in achieving what it was, what they were shooting for in nonviolent terms, just by the process of bringing a debate to the country of forcing the discussion of issues that incumbent politics, politicians just wanted to lay aside, we would have won a legitimate victory.

But when King and Kennedy were snuffed out on the just on the threshold of that victory, there was suddenly know where to turn, and people got frightened.

They got angry.

People in the movement started saying, Hey, look, we wondered all along.

If the other side will, it would allow us a legitimate a legal victory.

The more pessimistic and radical among us had been saying all along that the other side would never allow a legal victory that at the last minute something would be done to preempt the movement if it ever did.

Become threatened to become victorious on its own nonviolent terms.

That something was those two assassinations and they left us exposed.

They left us leaderless.

They left us to our own devices to our own rhetoric.

And it seemed to the I would say the best and the brightest of that generation, that the only honest thing for them to do the only honorable thing to do was to find some way to fight that fire with an equivalent fire.

If the other side was going to destroy our legitimate leaders, then there was no soul left in legitimate politics, and we would have to go outside the given and outside the legitimate.

Maybe you could say it this way in those days.

Back way long ago in the 19 sixties, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I thought that faith in representative government and constitutional democracy was widely shared and taken as a matter of course by the population at large.

These days, I don't think that it's not a majoritarian point of view.

It's a minority faith.

And it's if and it's a hope for the future.

A belief in American democracy these days must be a belief that in the future, democracy will succeed.

It must be a faith that in the future people will learn.

We people will learn that we have to conduct our own affairs or we will have those affairs conducted for us.

So it's a faith that people can become small D Democrats.

Small are Republicans, whereas before it was a faith that people already were of that disposition.

I now see democracy and true Republicanism as a forward looking project for political action and not as a set of conditions that could be taken for granted.