So, at a time in the country when new kinds of people were making new kinds of demands that thrilled some and worried, even angered, others, Lexington was a place that was going to have to make some choices. Consider all that as the backdrop to the two events I want to describe.
Thing One happened over Memorial Day weekend of 1971, and it’s one of my first “public” memories—most of what I can recall from the previous nine years of my life are private events that involved me and my family, not history. This one involved both. The war in Vietnam had increasingly divided Lexington—thousands of residents had turned out in 1969 to rally on the common for a moratorium in the fighting. “Peace at any cost is not the American dream,” the newspaper had editorialized in response. Two years earlier, a couple of high-school students had organized a demonstration in support of the troops, which drew three thousand people to the same spot. But all this was prelude: in May, 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (a group that included a lanky twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry, who had just become famous for making a speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which he asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”) announced plans to follow the route of Paul Revere’s midnight ride in reverse, ending on Boston Common. The group had got approval to camp on the Friday night near the bridge in the neighboring town of Concord, and had asked Lexington’s selectmen for permission to bivouac on the town’s historic common, also known as the Battle Green, the next night. “Lexington could be a South Vietnamese or Laotian village,” they said. Like the Minutemen of 1775, Vietnamese guerrillas were “simply fighting for the privilege to determine their own destiny,” and to “exist apart from foreign domination.”
But Lexington Common had a 10 P.M. curfew, and the board of selectmen refused to lift it. The veterans could march single file through the town, and hand out leaflets, as long as they did not litter the sidewalks, but the board chairman—a lifelong town resident named Robert Cataldo, who was also a nursing-home administrator, and had been awarded the Purple Heart during the Second World War—said that “the Board agreed that no good purpose could be served by the demonstration or the encampment.” The veterans, at their encampment in Concord, voted to defy the order and to bivouac on the Battle Green the next night.