Jerry Rubin

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson used a small naval skirmish in Vietnam between the North Vietnamese and the U.S. Navy to justify a massive military campaign in that small country. Almost as soon as American troops were ordered to Indochina, civil rights and free speech activists joined together to protest the American involvement in Vietnam. One of the earliest protests was held on October 15, 1965, near the University of California at Berkeley when tens of thousands of protesters attempted to close down the Oakland Army Terminal where recruits were shipped out for Vietnam. The umbrella organization for this activity was the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), which was led by Jerry Rubin who had also been active in the Free Speech Movement (FSM).

In this excerpt from his book, Do It!, Rubin explains how he helped organize the first large peace march...