Conflict in the Movement

Looking back on its greatest success --the Oct. 15 Moratorium Day--the multifaceted U.S. peace movement is exhilarated. Looking ahead to its plans for November, it is worried. Can the momentum be sustained? Can violence be avoided? Most of all, will the desire for peace prevail over the movement's tendency to wage internal war over goals and tactics?

Publicly, the factional leaders last week expressed optimism and pledged cooperation--at least through the activities scheduled for Nov. 13, 14 and 15. Yet privately, key participants conceded that a serious split had been narrowly averted and that basic disagreements remained unresolved.

The potential conflict is over how sharply the goals of the peace drive should be focused and how broad a following it should seek. The Viet Nam Moratorium Committee, which organized the Oct. 15 demonstrations, is led mainly by politically oriented moderates and liberals. Created quickly on the strength of a novel idea, it seeks the broadest possible enlistment of public opinion to persuade Congress and the President that U.S. involvement in the war must be ended promptly. Its emphasis is upon campus and community activity to get much of middle America personally involved.

This notion is regarded as too slow and too square by elements of the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Viet Nam, a loose federation comprising representatives of some 50 established groups long allied with peace efforts. They include such diverse organizations as the National Council of Churches, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Student Mobilization Committee and the Urban Coalition. Its leaders tend to be older and in some cases more militant and more radical than the Moratorium leadership. Some of them helped organize the protests during the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and they met last summer in Cleveland to plan mass "Marches Against Death" for November in Washington and San Francisco. To many of those active in the "New Mobe," the war is just one of the reasons for protest. They prefer dramatic tactics and appeal particularly to big-city and campus leftists.

Sexy Washington. Those differences posed no real problem until the two groups began to wonder whether the Mobilization's November marches would conflict with the simultaneous two-day Moratorium demonstrations of Nov. 13 and 14. Moratorium leaders were not eager to dilute local activities by encouraging demonstrators to go to Washington. They also feared that a chaotic Washington protest would taint the whole peace movement and drive moderates out.

A crisis developed when some of the New Mobe's most militant steering-committee members called a hurried meeting in Washington and voted to exclude businessmen and politicians from the speakers' platform for the Washington rally. Too many such men, they argued, had either profited from or approved war appropriations. When Moratorium leaders heard of the action, they met with some of Mobilization's less radical leaders and argued forcefully that such a move would alienate all the politicians and average citizens who had been recruited by M-day. They won the argument. Both groups held press conferences to announce that each supported the other's November plans.

Actually, each organization will concentrate almost exclusively on its own plans--and each has its hands full. "We don't want people to say we peaked in October," explains Verne Newton, a coordinator of the Viet Nam Moratorium Committee in New York. "Yet we almost achieved our capacity for mobilizing every possible person against the war then." He concedes that the Washington march, which seeks to rally 45,000 people who will walk single file from Arlington National Cemetery to the Capitol over a period of 36 hours, bearing the names of U.S. war dead and destroyed Vietnamese villages, will lure many demonstrators away from New York. Said Newton: "This is a movement of people and we must go where the people want to go--and right now Washington is sexier." Similar factional arguments over what kind of political spectrum the demonstrations should embrace have broken out in Massachusetts and California.

Peace movement leaders insist that their disagreements are not serious. "Many people prefer to act out their feelings on the war in large rallies," contends Boston's Jerome Grossman, one of the Moratorium's creators. "Others prefer to work on the nitty-gritty local activities. There is no rivalry, just a difference of function." Perhaps. But many leaders in both camps are worried that the November demonstration may be used as a stage for the wild and the ultraradical. In a lengthy mass march, a determined handful could start serious trouble. That could evoke a popular reaction against the entire peace movement.

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