DOC RELATES TO PROJECT MERRIMAC (MERRIMACK) - SITUATION INFORMATION REPORT

• Document Type: SPECIALCOLLECTION
• Collection: MHCHAOS
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 00018026
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2024
• Document Release Date: December 24, 2024
• Publication Date: March 13, 1970

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13 March 070
HIGHLIGHTS
SITUATION INFORMATION REPORT
I. Anti-Draft Week. --Net week (16-22 March) the big three
of the anti-war protest, the New Mobe, the Vietnam Moratorium
Committee and the Student Mobe will stage Act II of the winter-
spring endlthe-war offensive.
The New Mobe, a supercilious peacenik cum communist
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conglomerate of over 100 organizationg ranging from the hyper-
naive (American Council of Churches) to the doctrinaire dedicated
radical revolutionary (CPUSA) appears to be playing the leadijIg
role in the broad protest community. The New Mobe's vocal and
more violence prone little brother, the Student Mobe, is directing
its attention to the college and high school campuses. The Student
Mobe, incidentally, is the child of multistriped communism. It was
conceived in the mid 1960's and sired jointly by.the CPUSA, the SWP
and the PLP. Two years later the CPUSA opted for increased
emphasis-on its very own W. E.B. du Bois Club, the Maoist PLP
felt more mileage was being obtained through infiltration of the
radical SDS and the Trotskyite SWP moved into sole control and
domination of the then college campus oriented Student Mobe. The
"Trot" catalyst was the party youth appendage, the Young Socialist
Alliance. �
Today all major Student Mobe leadership posts are held by
YSA'ers and most of these YSA'ers also hold credentials in the
parent party. The Student Mobe is probably the largest radical
political entity on the American college scene today. It must be
conceded that the Socialist Workers Party has shown the most real-
istic and imaginative organizing and structuring capacity among the
old left monoliths in infiltrating and involving the university and high-
school student community. The SWP provides money, philosophy,
and guidance. The YSA plays the traditional revolutionary vanguard
role among the youth, and the Student Mobe provides the mass move-
ment suppoort by rallying to the classic "worthy cause." Unfortun-
ately, too many Student Mobe joiners just don't read the facts, know
the 'history, or realize theksuper dupe-sucker role to which the, have
been relegated by a men handful of talented and crafty- professional
revolutionaries.
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The VMCts piece of next wesek's action is, compared to
the others, minor. The VMC'ers for all of their rhetoric are
showing signs of being upstaged by the more sophisticated com-
munist organizers and agitators. .The names of 'VMC leaders
who were practically household words last October and even into
the mass November demonstrations (Sam Brown, David Hawk,
Marge Sklencar, etc.) are seldom mentioned this time.
The national press seems once again to have been co-opted
into fulfilling the propaganda and publicity requirements of the anti-
war coalition.leftists. The lengthy reporting of the statements of
such fuzzywiLs as former Alaska 'Senator Ernest Gruening, such
radicals as Women's Strike for Peace' Cora Weiss, a raft of per-
verse peacenik preachers, hippies, and activists such as Tony
Avirgan have sounded a clarion call to. revolutionary impression-
ables.
The entire week is to be devoted to anti-draft activities in 100
major American cities in an effort to close down, at least for a day,
most of the country's 4100 draft boards. The tactics will be mostly.
traditional but a few new wrinkles will also be introduced this time.
Protest leaders in leaflets and brochures have distinguished between
legal actions and illegal ones so as to provide a means�for all desiring
to participate to "do their thing." There will be placard carrying
picket marches, ".haunt-ins" and "comply-ins" (legal) and civil diso-
bedience "sit-ins," "chain-ins" (illegal) and "confrontation dialogues"
with draft board officials and workers (illegal if it obstructs the busi-
ness of the board.) �
The so called "comply-ins" will take protest and obstruction
advantage of obscure tenets of the Selective Service law to paralyze
local boards with unneeded and unwanted (but technically required)
information. All male citizens born after August 30, 1922, should
be registered. Additionally, registrants are required to inform
their draft.boarcl of all things which may affect their classification.
Boards are required to keep everything sent and add it to the regis-
trant's file. A New Mobe leaflet recommends mailing (registered
mail--return receipt requested) daily reports on the registrant's
health, bibles and books that have influenced the registrant's thinking
(for a possible claim to conscientious objetctor status) and other large
objects. The objective is,4to drown the draft board in its own bur-
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The "haunt-in" is designed to harass members of local
draft boards. *Demonstrators are urged to determine where board
� 'members work and live and to picket them all hours of the day and
night. -
Other activities on the week's agenda will be organizing a
draft card turn-in and conducting a "we won't go" petition circula-
tion among those too young to te draft card Carriers. Campus
military recruiters are probably in for a week of nastiness. Peti-
tions signed by as many draft resisters-as can be obtained will also
be turned into the Senate Armed Services Committee for its meeting
scheduled later. in March.. The guerrilla theater will stage the usual
bizarre and immature (and according to the critics not particularly
well-acted) dramas in front of selected boards, mainly on March 16.
The groups will portray the condemning of boards as public health
hazards and place them in quarantine. New Mobe leadership as also
suggested setting up a lottery at a public rally to dccisle which local
hoard or recruiting center to block. Washington area campuses will
host "teach-ins" on the 17th. �:'syt
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Although next Thursday (the 19th) is the designated major
protest day when a march on the National Selective Service head-
quarters will take place at about noon (and a coffin fille.d with draft
cards will be presented to Acting Director Colonel Dee Ingoid) activ-
ities will be conducted the entire week. Women's Strike for Peace
will demonstrate at the White House on the 18th.
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Next week's demonstrations are a sure betie produce violence
in some areas. The interruption of induction processing on March
18 is also planned and will pit draftees against activists.- Although
spokesmen for the New Mobe and Student Mobe are preaching non-
violence and state that they will not forcefully enter draft boards or
destroy draft records.- the climate for violence has been created by
the radical leadership and broadcasted by the legitimate and under-
ground press. The organizing machinery at the Washington head-
quarters is well experienced and relatively efficient. Leaders
predict that several thousand demonstrators will be arrested. The
prediction will probably be accurate. There will al so be bruises,
black eyes 4-tnd bloodied heads, mostly among the sheep, few among
the shepherds.
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11. Age of the Bomb. --The clacsical tool of anarchy, the bomb,
is being used with increasing and alarming frequency in recent
weeks. Broadly reported in the media in past days have been the
old Cambridge Courthouse and the Featherstone autoblast, both
probably. connected with the Rap Brown prosecution underway (but
presently recessed until 17 March) at Bel Air. Probably of greater
significance, however, was the apparent accidental self-destruction
of the SDS bombworks at New York. Two very prominent new lefters
were directly involved, namely Cathy Wilkerson, long-time activist
(much of her efforts and energies spent-in the Washington area) in
whose father's house the slipshod manufacture was in progress, and
Ted Gold. Gold, blown to bits in the basement, was a confederate of
Mark Rudd at the Columbia University riot in 1968. He later, it
seems, found Weatherman not radical enough (or violent enough) and
became associated with the "Mad Dogs," a manifestly extremist
splinter from Weatherman, principally known to exist in the 1'1el.v York
area. One other victim so far has been dug from the-debris along
with SDS radical literature, dozens of dynamite sticks and hundreds
.of cap fuses. Cathy and a girlfriend escaped the building, apparently
after the first-blast but before the entire house was engulfed. Repor.tedly
one of the two women was naked and the other partially so.
Actually, bombs have been going off for months-now but isolated
enough so as not to attract much national attention. Earlier in the
winter there were 'a few explosions in New York, Oakland, Pittsburgh
and Seattle. During the third week in February, however, many
American cities were terrorized by planned and concerted bombings
in nearly every major city. Hardest hit were New�York and the San
Francisco Bay area. In New York .a-police station and a Navy recruit-
ing office were fire-bombed. Four Molotov cocktails were hurled at
the home of Justice John Murtagh, presently presiding judge at the
trial of the 13 Panthers. At Berkeley, New Leftists and street people
went on a destructive rampage throwing bombs at the police station
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and damaging 16 police cars and seriously injuring a police officer.
In the Haight-AshbUry section of San Francisco a precinct house wits
bombed, spraying glass and steel splinters into a room occupied by
12 policemen. Nine men were injured and one later died from a
metal fragment that. entered his eye and tore into his brain. The
underground Berkeley Barb, after the rash of bombings, observed
"All the cops around Park Station (Haight-AshIntry) wear the faces
or men at war.... The fats at Park Station are the fares of Ameri-
can patrols coming back from a nig}tt with the Viet Cong. -The 'face
of being struck with a war where the natives used to be friendly._ But
this war is at home." See 15 March Addendum, p. 9. '
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13 March 1970
CALENDAR OF TENTATIVELY SCHEDULED ACTIVITIES
Asterisked items are either reported for the first time, or
contain additions or changes to previously reported activities.
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*13 March to 28 April, Washington, D.C.
Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam and the Paci-
fist Fellowship of Reconciliation are still carrying on their Lent to
Passover fast and picket of the White House. The event which has
now lost its newsworthiness is no longer being publicized in tile press.
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March, San Jose, California
The Radical Action Movement faction of SDS at San Jose State
College reportedly is planning to close the .Student Union there during
industrial recruiting (Career Days) in March. 2V:.,1 in )�- 1. 1
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*14 March to I May, California
The University of California Ecology Action organization at
the Berkeley campus will stage a "survival walk" from Sacramento
to Los Angeles. Between 100 and 200 marchers are expected to
participate with other persons joining for rallies along the way. A
major stop is planned at Delano, center of the chronic grape pickers
labor strife. Presently, along the ecology line, Mexican-American
grape pickers arc protesting the use of pesticides in the field. Other
stopping points along the way will be Stockton, Modesto, Merced,
Fresno, Visalia-Tulare, and Bakersfield. The "survival walk" will
terminate on Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, probably on I May.
=::15 March, California - Sec Addendum, p. 9.
16-22 March, Nationally
(See.Highlights--Anti-Draft Week) Although individually spon-
soring separate activities, the three main coalition umbrellas of �
anti-war, anti-establishment dissidents: the New Mobilization
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Committee, the Student Mobilization Committee, and the Vietnam
Moratorium Committee: are jointly supporting one another's
actions and with heavy overlapping of membership and leadership,
most activities will represent combined effort. As part of the "back
to the grass roots" winter-spring planned activities, March is
intended to be highlighted by concentrating on anti-draft actions with
the emphasis in the week of 16-22 March. The 19th has been selected
as the day of large scale, nonviolent confrontations with draft board
employees.
*17 March, Del Air, Mariland
The H. 'Rap Brown trial scheduled to resume after a one
week recess. See Highlights--Age of the Bomb.
*20 March, Asheville, Alabama
Reportedly the United Klans of America plans'a massive rally
at the courthouse in protest of Nation of Islam (Black Muslim) activi-
ties in St. Clair County. Ill.� % �� � /
21 March, New York City, New York
Women's liberation groups throughout New York are nlanning
. a demonstration at Bryant Park to support the legal .challenges being
brought against New York State abortion laws. I.::
22-29 March, National
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A National Black Referendum on Vietnam has been organized
to allegedly determine whether or not Black people favor the immediate
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. According to one piece of
organizational literature, "Official voting will begin Palm Sunday,
22 March, .and continue daily that entire week, ending on Easter
Sunday, March 29, at 2 p.m. Voting stations will be all Black churches
participating in the campaign, in every Black community throughout
the entire U.S." Supplied by the organizers of the Referendum is a
kit of literature giving instructions on propagandizing and conducting
the Referendum and expressing a strong stand against the war. The
likes of Oesie DAVIS, Julian BOND, LeRoi JONES, Dr. George WILEY,
mut U. Rap BROWN are on the National Executive Council of the Refer-
endum. Irving DAVIS of t NCC is one of the national program on rdina-
tors.
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How many "votes" will be tallied is conjectural but not the
result--which will obviously show almost all those voting to be for
the ballot's one simple proposition: the total, immediate with-
drawal of all American troops and Money from Vietnam.
23-26 March.- 8:30-10 p.m. EST, National Educational TV
- National Educational T;levision (NET) will devote an unore-
cedgnted 6-hour block of prime time March 23-26 for the showing
of "Trial--The City and County of Denver vs. Loren R. Watson." The
documentary marks the first time that the complete scope�of a single
trial is examined on an American television program.
The program is broken into four 90-Minute nortions to cor-
respond with the trial's four clays. As a result, the nsual NET
schedule has been preempted so that these portions may be ortsentecl
on successive nights (Monday through Thursday) from 8:30-10 p.m.
EST.
Loren Watson, the defendant in the trial, was arrested by a .
Denver patrolman and charged with resisting and interfering with a
police officer. "The issue has national implications, involving
police and Panthers, the American system and the blackman," notes
Don Dixon, NET' s directbr of public affairs pro gramminc.z. "The case
is really a microcosm, reflecting one of our country's most critical
concerns." The antagonism between Watson and the Denver police
forms a subcurrent within the trial and is a basis of Attorney.Leonard
Davies' -defense of Watson.
"We wanted to represent the ritual drama of American justice,"
says producer Robert M. Fresco. "Therefore, everything within the
trial is placed chronologically in the documentary." Within four days,
Fresco has interspersed interviews with Watson, Davies, Judge Zita
Weinshienk, Assistant City Attorney Wright Morgan, prosecutor in this
case, and police officer Robert C. Cantwell, who made the charge
against Watson.
NET Journal--"Trial�The City and County of Denver vs.
Loren R. Watson" will be seen on most of the public television sta-
tions across the U.S. that are interconnected by NET. Local broad-
cast times and dates may vary, however.
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24 March, National
A full-length documentary film, "Ring: a filmed record...
Montgomery to Memphis," will be at approximately 1,000 theaters
in 300 cities across the country. A nationwide goal is to raise 5
million dollars for organizations dedicated to fighting the war on
poverty, illiteracy and social injustice. All funds collected will
go directly to the Martin Luther King Special Fund in Atlanta.
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*25-29 March, Denver, Colorado
A Major conference of Chicanos will be held in Denver at the.
end of March. The conference is sponsored by the militant Crusade
for Justice, a leading Chicano force in the southwest headed by Corky
Gonzalez, and will run from March.25 to 29. Chicano groups are
expected from all parts of the country. Puerto Rican activists have
also been invited. It is the second such Chicano parley. �Lait year a
Chicano conference in Denver drew 1500 persons. A:three day Chicano
Youth Conference March 25-27 will open the parley.
On March 28, Chicanos will convene to discuss El Plan de �
Aztlan which calls for the formation of an independent local, regional
and national Chicano political party. A National Congress of Aztlan
has been called for March 29. The congress will' discas-a program
for a nation "autonomously free, culturally, socially, economically
and politically." El olan de Aztlan provides the underlying theme
for the conference. The program says that Chicanos "must use their
nationalism as the key or common denominator foromass mobilization
and organization."
Aztlan is the name that the Aztecs and other Indian tribes used
to describe a certain segment of territory to the north of their lands.
Chicanos refer today to that section of the southwest in the United
States, comprising Arizona; New Mexico and oart of Texas, Colorado
and California as Aztlan and the home of the Chicano people. "Our
struggle then must be control of our.Barrios, campos, pueblos, lands,
our economy, our 'culture, and our political life," the plan states.
The program says that "economic control of our lives and our com-
munities can only come about by driving the exploiter out of our
communities, our pueblos, and our lands and by controlling and
developing our own talents, sweat and resources.
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Among the positions are community control of the schools,
and restitution for past econornic slavery, political exploitation, ethnic
and cultural psychological destruction, denial of civil and human
rights and for "self defense of the community." "Cultural values of
our people strengthen our identity and the moral backbone of the move-
ment. Our culture unites and educates the family of La Raza towards
liberation with one heart and one mind," the program reads. "Politi-
cal liberation can only come through an independent action on our part,
since the two party system is the same animal with two heads that
feeds from the same trough. Where we-are a majority we will con-
trol; where.we are a minority we will represent a pressure group;
nationally, we will represent one party--La Familia de La Raza.."
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The conference will include numerous workshops on social
revolution and culture.
*29 March to 3 April, Quebec, Canada
A "Cultural Exchange Meeting" has reportedly been planned
to attract anti-establishment students from throughout the world.
The gathering will also allegedly include U.S. military personnel who
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*15 April, Nationwide
April anti-War activities planned by the New Mobe, the Student
Mobe and VMC will be the concluding phase of their major three
pronged winter-spring offensive. It will center ernopha.sis on taxation
for the war, etc. Details of April plans will be reported in subsequent
Situation Information Reports.
*Addendum - 15 March, California
The Mendocino County (California) Sheriff on March 12 telexed
an all points bulletin warning of a major bomb threat for l5 March.
The general prime target is public utilities, presumably in northern
California, but the precise target(s) have not been indicated. The
sheriff's office at Ukiah has alerted military installations, National
Guard units, all law enforcement agencies, utility companies, and .
major industrial complexes. No further details are known at this
time.
SOURCE: Government and news media.
RELIABILITY: Probably true. -
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