E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

We chat with Professor Sukenick who has also come down. Possessed of a delicate sense of occasion he does not ask me how my work is going. We stroll to the Justice Department. There on the steps a microphone is set up for speeches. Cops guard our right of assembly. Cops stand in the doors of the Justice Department to ensure that we stay outside. Photographers take pictures of our faces. Four young American Nazis in swastika armbands are there to hurl taunts. They are taunt hurlers. As the speeches begin I find a place for us to sit down. Phyllis feeds the baby. I walk around the edges of the crowd, from sun to shadow, from shadow to sun. Dr. Spock is there. The Chaplain of Yale is there. The demonstration today is an act of civil disobedience. The young cats turn in their draft cards, the older cats aid and abet them. Arrest is invited. Sitting on the steps listening to the speakers is Norman Mailer. He wears a dark suit and vest. He leans forward, his left forearm on his left knee, his right fist on his right knee. Behind him, festooned in the deep stone sill of the ground floor Justice Department window, is Robert Lowell. Lowell is arranged cherubically. I watch Lowell smoke and press his eyeglasses to the bridge of his nose. I watch him making up his poetry.

The point of the drama is reached and the draft cards of hundreds of college boys across the country are dropped in a pouch by their representatives. There is applause. Others in the crowd are invited to add their own cards, Many do. I make my way through the crowd, and drop my card into the pouch, and say my name into the microphone. Daniel Isaacson, although the card is in the name of Daniel Lewin. My ears glow from an inner surge of righteousness and fear. What a put-on. But I have come here to do whatever is being done.

The pouch is delivered to the Justice Department, the demonstration ends, and nothing seems to have happened except the demonstration.

That night a crash committee set us up at the home of a sympathetic lady who had opened her house for “the Movement.” It was an old, well-maintained house in a quiet neighborhood. The lady showed us to our room. “I can’t physically march,” she said, “but I can support those who do.” She was a frail, gracious lady whose soft quavering voice seemed to transmit itself through her hands which shook with a slight palsy. Her house was very still. It was brimming with silence. Thin white curtains hung across the window of our room. There was a large oversoft bed with a cathedral headboard of mahogany. The baby was placed in a wooden rocking cradle. The floor was constructed of wide planks fastened with pegs. On an old splintery hope chest stood a white bowl and inside the bowl was a large pitcher with fine fractures in its glaze. Phyllis was charmed by the room. She ran her fingers along the glass curtains, and inspected the old pitcher and washbowl. She rocked Paul to sleep in the cradle and took off her clothes and brushed her long hair sitting crosslegged in the middle of the soft bed. She was serenely happy suspended in this quiet room in the absolute stillness of this house.

The last time I had been in Washington, D.C., the occasion was a vigil at the White House. Susan and I held candles in our hands and rested our foreheads on the White House fence. That is a famous news picture. It appears as if we’re looking through prison bars. Washington was our town, I played Washington when I was a kid.

The next day, Saturday, is the big event. We sit for hours in the grass at the Lincoln Memorial and listen to the speeches. All around us people with signs on placards, on poles. Young Christian men and women, veterans, radicals with long hair. Self-conscious professors, older women in walking shoes and red noses of pert participation. Guitarists. Freaks with painted faces and gendarme capes waving broom handles crowned with boxes decorated with pictures of flowers and Joan and Bobby and Allen. Scuba divers with white bones painted on their black wetsuits. Priests. Members of organizations with hand-painted banners. It is a beautiful day. All the happy freaks of cold war have poured out of their chartered buses, climbed out of their sleeping bags, each life famous, and come to march on the Pentagon. The crowd is enormous. At the steps of Lincoln Memorial hoarse speakers shout into their microphones. I feel the concussion of crowd assent. I come under the awful conviction of everyone’s greater right to be here. I feel out of it. It seems to me that practically everyone here, even Phyllis listening past the point of normal attention to the endlessness of the droning speeches, has taken possession of the event in a way that is beyond me. I feel as if I have sneaked in, haven’t paid, or simply don’t know something that everyone else knows. That it is possible to still do this, perhaps. Or that it is enough. In the heat of midday it is suddenly time to rise and form up in the march. Lasers of sun spear at the eyes of camera lenses. Bodies rise. Heat rises. Banners are raised, unfurled, the equipage of the picnic army clanking and groaning and creaking into rank.

In the jamming crowd I feel the first whispers of death by suffocation.

“This is where it begins to get heavy,” I tell Phyllis.

She looks at me in alarm. I take her arm to get her out of there, walking away down the green, walking the other way.

“But this is what we came down for!”

“I don’t want to have to worry about you, Phyl. I want you to go back to that lady’s house and wait there until I’m through.”

She was very unhappy.

“Phyllis, you didn’t really intend to take your baby into that. Troops with bayonets. Tear gas. Did you? You can’t be sure what’s going to happen.”

“But I want to go!”

“All right, you go. Give me Paul and you go.” She doesn’t want that, and I feel acquiescence to my logic — to the logic of my right and need to come here to do what is being done — in the sudden lack of resistance to my hand of her arm, the consent of her hurried steps as we go looking for a cab somewhere in the direction of Washington.

All day I looked for satisfaction. At one point during the squeeze on the bridge from the Lincoln Memorial across the river, I thought I caught a glimpse of Sternlicht in a three-pointed hat. But I was pretty far back from the front line where he would have been. There were more speeches in a parking lot across the highway from the Pentagon. Then I followed some people running toward a break in the fence: you ran up an embankment, across the highway, and you were on the Mall at the mouth of the Pentagon itself.

It still wasn’t clear what was going to happen. The mood was festive. There were rumors that achieving the Mall was meaningless because it had been permitted by arrangement between the organizers of the march and the officials of the Pentagon. Then, as it began to turn dark, lots of people began to leave. There was room to see where the MP’s and the marshals stood in rank at the steps of the front entrance. There was room to move up front. One could examine the mandarin faces. God was on their side. No matter what is laid down there will be people to put their lives on it. Soldiers will instantly appear, fall into rank, and be ready to die for it. And scientists who are happy to direct their research toward it. And keen-witted academics who in all rationality develop the truth of it. And poets who find their voice in proclaiming the personal feeling of it. And in every house in the land the muscles of the face will arrange in smug knowledge of it. And people will go on and make their living from it. And the religious will pray for a just end to it, in terms satisfactory to it.

It was now dark and getting very cold. It was possible to find a bonfire and be with others. There was a lot of dope to smoke. The feeling was good. Here and there, ceremonies of burning draft cards. Constant heckling of troops, singing; diggers coming around with loaves of bread, and baloney, and beer, and Pepsi. Still I am exhausted with this striving. It is as if my presence — none of them knows — but my attendance has robbed the day of genius.