Anti-Viet Rally at MSG

June 9, 1965 - An audience of nearly 17,000 cheered from 7 to 11:30 p.m. last night at a Madison Square Garden rally as one speaker after another assailed U.S. policy in Vietnam.

The rally, organized by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, roared its approval as Senator Wayne Morse (D-Ore.) urged President Johnson to appeal to the U.N. General Assembly to call a peace conference of all interested parties to the Vietnam conflict.

U.S. policy in Vietnam, Morse said, “is not a consensus of our people, nor even the community of nations; it is a consensus among the State Department, Defense Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and the White House. I predict that they will continue to widen and expand this war unless the American people rise up to stop them.”Morse said that the U.S. had not brought peace to South Vietnam nor halted the advance of Communism there, but that, by its tactics, it was “driving Asians by the millions into the arms of Communism.”

The Socialist leader Norman Thomas won applause too when he told Morse later that he had a “bone to pick” with him. How, Thomas demanded, could the U.N. bring Communist China into any conference when that country was not even a member of the world organization?

Thomas went on to say that attempts to police the world against ideas — Communist or otherwise — and intervention in other people’s wars would force “a divided Communism” to close ranks.

Other speakers included Bayard Rustin, organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Mrs. Martin Luther King, and Hans Morgenthau, professor of political science at the University of Chicago.

Outside the Garden, about 100 pickets, some for the rally and some against, marched. Wooden barriers and a line of policemen kept the two groups apart, but there were a few minor scuffles.

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