WASHINGTON, DC -- To say it was "cold" doesn't do Saturday's weather in the nation's capital complete justice. It was a deceptive chill, masked in brilliant sunshine and lacking the wind to drive it through your bones. The cold crept in on you, layer by layer, slowly pinching the toes and reddening the nose until its full impact -- 24 degrees that felt more like 13 -- made itself known.

Despite the frigid conditions, thousands of Americans opposed to the Bush administration's drive to war with Iraq showed up at the US Capitol. They came from all over the East Coast and the Midwest. Huddled together, they patiently endured an unending parade of speakers on the makeshift stage. Their frozen arms lifted up homemade signs for C-SPAN's cameras to see. Backpacks clashed with the bodies behind them, but good cheer abounded.

"You are the truest patriots of this country," Representative John Conyers told the crowd. The Michigan congressman -- who has been among the most vigorous critics of the Bush administration's conduct in the war on terrorism at home and abroad -- added that he thought it would be a "cold day in Washington before the country turned against this war." It was, Conyers noted, a cold day in Washington.

Thanks for reminding us.

The deep freeze was unusual for DC, but the speeches at Saturday's mass rally

had the air of same-old, same-old. International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) was the event's main organizer -- and the customary organized chaos and self-indulgence of the post-Vietnam left dominated. Waves of speakers -- many focused on lefty pet causes such as Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu-Jamal -- got yet another five minutes on national TV.

Backstage, a mild frisson of celebrity-gawking reigned, as various journalists jostled to get Jessica Lange and Tyne Daly's thoughts on the war. Patti Smith turned up well into the rally, an hour or so before she was due to sing, looking pinched and serious.

If new ground was broken on Saturday, it came in the form of a simple equation: the organizers' myriad political and organizational flaws plus the bitter chill did not equal a dimming of the antiwar movement. Quite the opposite. The antiwar crowd proved stronger than both its organizers and the weather.

The crowd estimates for Saturday's rally and march have been ambiguous at best. International ANSWER claimed 500,000. Various Washington, DC, law-enforcement officials set the number at 30,000 to 100,000. (My own personal estimate -- having witnessed the surprising 100,000-person antiwar turnout on a glorious afternoon last October -- was that Saturday's march was slightly larger. Say 110,000 or so.)

But by any measure, it was a remarkable turnout. The crowd came in all shapes and sizes and flavors -- young and old, men and women. Together, these individual voices and expressions drowned out the speeches with a simple message: the war on Iraq is wrong.

Brian Slagle -- an artist from Frederick, Maryland -- made gorgeous artsy signs out of natural wood and tree branches that he and a few of his friends carried to the march. One of his creations was a simple honeycomb-shaped silo with a wooden sign that read SUPPORT FARMS, NOT ARMS.

"We have a group of artists that work together called the Blue Elephant," Slagle told me, "and a lot of our work is these kinds of materials. We thought it would be a good idea to come out and use some of our art to express the beauty of creation rather than destruction."

Others in DC on Saturday took their art to the market of the street corner. Jethro Heiko came down from Boston to hawk dark-blue T-shirts with a quote from President George W. Bush on the front (I MADE IT CLEAR TO THE WORLD, THAT EITHER YOU'RE WITH US OR WITH THE ENEMY) and the word ENEMY emblazoned on the back of the shirt. The six folks vending T-shirts with Heiko in the cold could barely keep up with the demand.

"They're selling great," enthused Heiko. "We sold a few hundred at the October protests here in DC, and on November 3, we sold about 50 at Boston protests." Heiko noted that a lot of his creativity has gone into making shirts to fight the Millennium Skyscraper and the destruction of Fenway Park, but "we've been doing more antiwar stuff lately."

Jonti Simmons spent four and a half hours traveling from Raleigh, North Carolina, to unveil her sign: DICK AND BUSH MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR. She nibbled a bit on her pierced lip when I asked her about her sign. "George Bush and Dick Cheney are creating a huge war for money," she said. "It's an unnecessary war."

I PEE ON BUSHES -- T-shirt worn by a German shepherd wandering through the January 18 rally site.

The laws of protest physics are even sharper and more clear-cut in the cold. A moving body is a warmer body. Marching beats yakking.

However, in preparing a route for the afternoon's march, the organizers may well have outfoxed themselves. Rather than parade along the National Mall for the benefit of gawking tourists, International ANSWER plotted a course past the Capitol and the National Botanical Gardens, through a rapidly gentrifying strip of Pennsylvania Avenue on Capitol Hill and a more slowly reviving strip of business along Eighth Street SE to the city's Navy Yard. The stated object was to pick up support along the way -- yuppies grazing at Starbucks and Cosí, Saturday-afternoon customers of Eighth Street's struggling pizza shops and Chinese take-out joints. But it appeared to have quite the opposite effect.

The march past the Capitol (and the wait in a huge bottleneck that formed at Independence Avenue SE and Washington Avenue SE) was a truly compelling sight. The street was jammed thick with protesters from the rally all the way to the crest of Capitol Hill and beyond. Drums were beating, chants were chanted. The crowd rippled with purpose and energy.

When the march finally turned onto Pennsylvania Avenue, however, things got fragmented. It was more carnival than peace march. Protesters bolted for hot coffee and snacks. Bars like the Hawk and Dove were filled up, with numerous protest signs stacked neatly outside against the wall. Counterculture met lunch counter -- and the marching army scoured for grub to fill its belly.

The numbers of marchers dwindled slowly but steadily as the protest swung onto Eighth Street, past a tiny knot of 30 pro-war counter-protesters at I Street (outnumbered by the cops "protecting" them from the marchers), and then along M Street to the Navy Yard Metro stop -- where a cordon of police cars and wooden barriers barred any further movement.

In addition to the numbing cold, there was a sense of anticlimax, heightened by the city's refusal to let a sound system be erected at the Navy Yard. Nearby, private buses were revved up and ready to spirit many of the chilled marchers away. Others made a weary trudge back to the National Mall on foot in clumps of four or five, leaving a trail of discarded signs opposing the war behind them.

Earlier in the day, I talked with Allen "Boff" Whalley, guitarist and singer for the Leeds artist/anarchist collective Chumbawamba, which had an improbable 1997 hit with the bouncy anthem "Tubthumping." (Chumbawamba opened the rally with a sparkling new ditty against the impending war called "Jacob's Ladder.")

I asked Whalley what he thought was the biggest difference between UK antiwar rallies and US antiwar rallies. "One of the main differences in Britain," he replied, "is that we have the big march -- and then we have the big rally after the march."

On a day like today, that would have made a bit more sense.

LAURA BUSH . . . REMEMBER LYSISTRATA -- a sign at the January 18 march.

One of the most provocative aspects of Saturday's march was its dedication as a "living tribute" to Philip Berrigan, one of the most influential and effective American peace activists of the 20th century. Berrigan died on December 6, at the age of 81, after a lifetime spent both in the harsh glare of the spotlight fighting the Vietnam War and nuclear arms and in quieter acts of civil disobedience and charity in the Baltimore neighborhood where he helped to found a community of activists known as Jonah House. Berrigan's tale is a story rich in complexity. It also offers an interesting perspective on one of the most fundamental debates in the present antiwar movement -- the debate over tactics.

After September 11, the American left found itself torn into two sides. On one side are purists who believe that almost any projection of US military and economic power beyond no-strings foreign aid and debt forgiveness is wrong. To many of this persuasion, the Al Qaeda attacks were "blowback" -- deeply tragic, but inevitable and thoroughly comprehensible. On the other side of the American left are pragmatists who can decipher the public mood and draw distinctions between a war of defense against Al Qaeda and the impending conflict against Iraq. For these pragmatists, the use of American power to weaken Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic and stop ethnic cleansing was justified.

At the core of this debate is a central question: who should speak for the antiwar movement? Will purists turn off deeper public opinion? Will pragmatists muddy the message?

The organizer of the large protests in October and on Saturday -- International ANSWER -- resides firmly on the purist side of the debate. The group has its roots in hard-core Marxism, and many of those associated with it (most notably former-US-attorney-general-turned-activist Ramsay Clark) argue that the use of US military might against Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, and Milosevic is wrong.

The pragmatists have been quick to attack. In the October issue of Mother Jones, Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin argued that the "cynics of the hard left have moved to the front of the current antiwar movement." He accused Clark and others of defending Hussein and Milosevic and offering no substantive and positive role for the US to play in world affairs other than "US Out Of Everywhere."

Gitlin and others (such as Marc Cooper, who, in an acerbic take on those heading up the peace movement penned in September for the Los Angeles Times, noted that "carrying water for Milosevic and Hussein ain't gonna help build the peace movement that we so desperately need") argue for broadening the protest movement. They think activists should tap into average Americans' latent fear and distrust of the Iraq conflict and shape them into an effective political voice.

The answer from ANSWER is a continuing and full-throated attack on the Bush administration and US imperialism -- including Clark's call on Saturday for a drive to "impeach President Bush."

On the surface, Berrigan's tale seems closer to ANSWER's views than those of the Gitlin/Cooper school. Berrigan spent years in jail for acts of civil disobedience, and his rhetoric about the criminality of the US and its nuclear-arms policy was harsh and unflinching. But beyond Berrigan's words, his actions had deeper currents that must also be navigated.

A decorated World War II veteran, Berrigan became a priest in 1950. His work with the poor and in civil-rights organizing in the early 1960s started him on a course that led to full-fledged civil disobedience by 1967, when he and three other compatriots stormed into the Customs House in downtown Baltimore and poured blood on Selective Service files.

Berrigan and the others were arrested, but he remained undeterred. Shortly afterward, he organized an even larger group -- which included his brother, the Jesuit poet and priest Daniel Berrigan -- to remove Selective Service files and burn them with napalm in the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville on May 17, 1968. The protest and subsequent trial of the "Catonsville Nine" may well have been the most influential and far-reaching antiwar gesture of the Vietnam era. But its effectiveness lay not in its purism, but in its creation of cognitive dissonance in the larger population. For a public all too familiar with the sight of students and radicals protesting Vietnam, seeing Catholic priests commit acts of civil disobedience opened a new front for the antiwar movement. It forced many Catholics who supported the war to question it.

I had a chance to interview Berrigan and others in the Catonsville Nine in 1992, for a long story on the 25th anniversary of the protest for the Baltimore City Paper. As he reminisced about the nonviolent clash that made such a deep impression, Berrigan told me that he spent a great deal of time analyzing what had gone wrong with the Baltimore Customs House raid, and honing the Catonsville action for maximum PR effectiveness.

"The first action had an effective result, but within a very modest context," Berrigan told me. "We thought the symbol of blood hadn't meant that much to Americans. . . . On the other hand, napalm was understood completely."

Another member of the Catonsville Nine, George Mische, told me that it was not just the symbolism that lent the Catonsville action its pervasive and far-reaching effect. "People looked at the antiwar movement and saw young people," he said. "They looked at us as a bunch of drug-smoking, punk kids . . . faggots. That's what they called us. But [the Catonsville Nine] changed that."

PATRIOTS SAY NO AGAIN TO KING GEORGE -- a sign at the January 18 march.

Catonsville's lessons have not been learned yet, by either the purists or the pragmatists. Watching the rally again on C-SPAN on Saturday night, I was struck by how the picture of the rally presented through the view of the camera was at odds with what happened out on the National Mall and in the march. There wasn't much that could be "understood completely" -- like Berrigan's napalm. Television viewers saw little of the crowd's creativity and goodwill -- people speaking simply and plainly with their feet and homemade signs. Those viewers didn't meet Brian Slagle or Jethro Heiko or Jonti Simmons. Instead, they were bored by an endless string of speakers assailing a wide range of injustices -- large and small, even petty and personal.

The extent of the coverage also varied wildly. Criticized by many for downplaying the large October antiwar protests in Washington, both the Washington Post and the New York Times put the protests above the fold on page one of their Sunday editions. But local media -- in DC, at least -- proved to be a much different story. For instance, as I marched along with the crowd down Eighth Street SE, toward the Navy Yard, I flicked on the
local all-news radio station, WTOP-AM. For most of the 45 minutes I tuned in, you wouldn't even know that tens of thousands of people were in town marching against the Bush administration's Iraq policy. When the station did break to live coverage of the march, it gave equal time to the tiny group of pro-war protesters who baited the marchers as they passed by. Editorially heavy-handed WTOP announcers saw fit to note at every turn that the station was airing "both sides" of the issue.

Local TV news was no better. On the ABC affiliate, the three dozen counter-protesters actually received more airtime than the approximately 110,000 antiwar marchers. Coverage time on the local CBS affiliate was roughly equal.

Here is a perfect illustration of just what the left's antiwar message is up against. And until the peace movement's leaders speak unambiguously, amplifying the powerful message of the people who come to march, and drawing upon the clear distinctions and sense of theater forged by activists like Berrigan, its case will not be heard.

Richard Byrne can be reached at richardbyrne1@earthlink.net.

Issue Date: January 24 - 30, 2003