Ditto in Washington, D. C.

The Tuesday before the Wednesday, Moratorium headquarters in Washington looked chaotic. It was only busy. On the eighth floor of the office building it occupied at Fourteenth and Vermont, the volunteers were stuffing and licking and stamping, working, already, on the mailing for the two-day demonstration planned for November. In his office, Sam Brown, the architect of the Youth for McCarthy crusade and now of the Moratorium, was explaining to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that the protest was not meant to embarrass Nixon but to build him a constituency for the only real goal of the demonstration—immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam. In another office down the hall, David Hawk, the all-American diver from Cornell and another co- chairman of the drive, was telling another reporter: “We’re trying to get beyond the academic community and into the suburbs. This has basically been a grass-roots movement, all we’ve done from the national office is coordinate the activities. We’re trying to get Americans to put pressure on their elevated officials at the local level. The guts of this thing is really community organizing.”

The walls of the Moratorium offices were decorated with the “Push the Button, End the War” and “Fathers and Sons against the War” posters that once had been full-page ads in the New York Times. Also pasted up were the letters from thirteen-year-old girls who’d donated their allowances, as well as the notes of support from servicemen still in Vietnam. There were newspaper clippings too, the ones the office workers found encouraging—“Hershey Fed to Protestors”; “Tom Seaver Opposes War.”

AR

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Anthony R. Dolan

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The Tuesday before the Wednesday, Moratorium headquarters in Washington looked chaotic. It was only busy. On the eighth floor of the office building it occupied at Fourteenth and Vermont, the volunteers were stuffing and licking and stamping, working, already, on the mailing for the two-day demonstration planned for November. In his office, Sam Brown, the architect of the Youth for McCarthy crusade and now of the Moratorium, was explaining to a reporter from the Los Angeles Times that the protest was not meant to embarrass Nixon but to build him a constituency for the only real goal of the demonstration—immediate American withdrawal from Vietnam. In another office down the hall, David Hawk, the all-American diver from Cornell and another co- chairman of the drive, was telling another reporter: “We’re trying to get beyond the academic community and into the suburbs. This has basically been a grass-roots movement, all we’ve done from the national office is coordinate the activities. We’re trying to get Americans to put pressure on their elevated officials at the local level. The guts of this thing is really community organizing.”

The walls of the Moratorium offices were decorated with the “Push the Button, End the War” and “Fathers and Sons against the War” posters that once had been full-page ads in the New York Times. Also pasted up were the letters from thirteen-year-old girls who’d donated their allowances, as well as the notes of support from servicemen still in Vietnam. There were newspaper clippings too, the ones the office workers found encouraging—“Hershey Fed to Protestors”; “Tom Seaver Opposes War.”