The night before October 2, 1967, at my mother’s Washington Heights apartment where I had grown up, I kept thinking, “This will be big. This will make a difference.” Then I worried: Was I indulging an adolescent fantasy, like rooting for the old Brooklyn Dodgers to come from behind in the bottom of the ninth, as I had often done in this very room? The event wasn’t a ballgame but the formal release the next day of our “Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority.” Signed by hundreds of famous and not-so-famous academics, writers, and intellectuals, the call committed us to breaking the draft law by urging potential inductees to say no to military service. In response to this big display of civil disobedience, the war-makers would react. But would the intervention of this “Call to Resist” begin to reverse the momentum of America’s war on Vietnam? Could anything do that?

I had spent much of the last four years ever-more enraged by what my country was doing in that faraway Asian nation and desperately seeking something—a statement, an action like the freedom rides, a commitment of my life and “sacred honor”—to bring about change. I wish I had a way to get this page physically hot to make my readers feel the fury with which I thought about the president, his advisers, the generals, and, yes, even the marine privates who were making Vietnam a place of torment and misery.

Now, at the distance of half a century, even an effective documentary like the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick film history The Vietnam War cannot make that fury sufficiently vivid. Poetry perhaps:

But even Levertov’s intensity fails before the tide of “hard rain” that was engulfing us. I’d been working for pacifist organizations. But now I felt that, given the opportunity, I’d lay nonviolence aside to somehow decapitate America’s warmongering leadership. I was hardly alone.