On the first Monday of May 1971, the police chief of Washington, DC, was in his cruiser well before dawn. In the darkness, Jerry Vernon Wilson picked up his police radio and broadcast to all hands the message he’d received on Saturday directly from the lips of Richard M. Nixon. “The desire of the president,” Wilson told them, “is that this city be open for business this week.”
For weeks, demonstrators had been flowing into Washington for marches, rallies, and sit-down protests, demanding an end to America’s war in Vietnam. The nonstop action had exhausted the police force and eroded the patience and confidence of the White House. Now the authorities worried about the finale of those protests, an action that would be the most audacious since the antiwar movement began six years earlier.
When the workweek got underway on May 3, the protesters, who called themselves the Mayday Tribe, planned to stream through the city, using their bodies and their cars to block bridges, traffic circles, and the approaches to government office buildings. Deprive Washington of its workers, and the federal city would stall. Mayday’s leaders hoped this unprecedented show of public disaffection would raise the “spectre of social chaos,” knocking Nixon off course and forcing him to bring all the troops home from Southeast Asia. For months, posters with the Mayday motto had been pasted on walls and bulletin boards at hundreds of universities, coffeehouses, and bookstores across the country: “If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government.”
Monday loomed as the largest act of mass civil disobedience the nation had ever seen, a coda to the most extraordinary season of dissent in Washington’s history. The chief knew he would be under scrutiny like never before, from the demonstrators, the press, city officials—and of course Nixon’s men. They were breathing down his neck. Richard Kleindienst, the deputy attorney general, arranged for one of his trusted aides to stick close to Wilson for the next three days. This would keep Kleindienst informed and, just as important, make the administration’s wishes known to the police chief in real time.
Still, Wilson permitted himself a bit of overconfidence. The day before, the chief had led his riot squad in an early morning raid on the Mayday encampment by the Potomac River. More than 40,000 people, most of them young, had arrived at West Potomac Park from all over the country, far more than Nixon’s men had expected. An all-day, all-night rock concert was a lot of the draw, but a good portion of the crowd had arrived to get ready for Monday’s blockade. It hadn’t been Wilson’s idea to secretly revoke their camping permit and force them to scatter; in fact he had initially resisted it. But now that it was done, he and his command believed the vast majority wouldn’t be back. The youngsters looked to be undisciplined, and there was no reason to think they had the capacity to act decisively as a group. Surprises were unlikely, since the cops had informants inside the Mayday planning meetings.