The March on the Pentagon in 1967 in Washington, D.C., its Multi-Perspectivity, and the Antiwar Protest Movement in the United States of America of the 1960s

The present dissertation titled “The March on the Pentagon in 1967 in Washington, D.C., its Multi-Perspectivity, and the Antiwar Protest Movement in the United States of America of the 1960s” shows how the March on the Pentagon, a major demonstration against the Vietnam War on October 21 and 22, 1967, was important as an attempt to reinvigorate democratic values in the United States of America. Previous studies have contributed to individual themes and factors involved in the March, but none have focused on the multiperspectivity of the event. My central historical research question asks how and why the individual observers and participants perceived the March on the Pentagon so differently. This leads to a new reassessment of the impact of this event as one protest against the Vietnam War.
This study relies on oral history, in particular field interviews in the United States and in Germany with U.S. participants and observers of the March, either by telephone or face-to-face. The study also considers contemporary media accounts of the March. Specific methodology for analyzing iconic and powerful photographs and newspapers such as the New York Times and the Washington Daily News followed the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, and Gérard Genette on intercommunication and intertextuality. Alongside the theoretical framework by Jürgen Habermas, whose work traces post-absolutist forms of public representation, the overall aim of a thick description of the March on the Pentagon as developed by Clifford Geertz is attained via the deliberate and conscious interconnection of different sources and various media.
Interviewees describe the March and its meaning from a variety of perspectives. One, a demonstrator, narrated the March as a turning-point in the antiwar movement on the basis of the media portrayal, the mass attendance and the violence that occurred. Other interviewees, including March organizers, considered it a turning-point because it reflected a new dimension of militancy in the antiwar movement. Participants, including soldiers and demonstrators, reflect directly and indirectly on the use of violence and power on all sides. Journalists, meanwhile, depicted the March as a confrontation between two “armies.” In short, the dissertation reinterprets the March as a turning-point, in the context of current secondary literature and embarks on new research on the event. As the war dragged on and antiwar coalitions fractured, opposition to the war began to permeate all levels of U.S. society. As a consequence of the March on the Pentagon, a new distribution of power, a new way of doing democracy had become the norm in American society.