Fighting Against the War

In the spring of 1970, a few days after National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio, Rep. Allard Lowenstein met with antiwar demonstrators on the Hofstra University campus.

The students were angry about the Kent State killings and bitter about the mounting death toll in Vietnam. Student strikes had spread to more than 400 American colleges and there was talk on many campuses of ``shutting down the system.''

Lowenstein, a Democrat elected in 1968 from the Long Beach congressional district, flashed a modest two-fingered peace sign and then quietly urged the Hofstra students to remain within the political system, working to defeat ``every man who sits in elected office . . . and votes for war.''

The soft-spoken man in his trademark rumpled suit never gave up on the possibility of orderly social change or the notion of winning hearts and minds with rational discourse. ``As a kid,'' he once recalled, ``I was always being beaten up and I was funny-looking and ended up feeling left out. I find I can always identify with the people who are left out.''

It was Lowenstein who had won national attention as the architect of the campaign to dump President Lyndon B. Johnson as the Democratic party's candidate in the 1968 election. At first, Lowenstein had attempted to recruit Robert F. Kennedy to lead the charge, then persuaded Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to serve as the antiwar challenger.

On March 12, 1968, with the help of hundreds of ``Get Clean for Gene'' college students, McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, a tally widely regarded as a stunning setback for Johnson. Four days later, Robert Kennedy entered the race and by the end of the month, Johnson announced on national television that he would not seek re-election.

It was McCarthy's candidacy, in fact, that brought Lowenstein to Long Island in 1968.

After the Wisconsin primary, Don Shaffer, a long-time civil rights activist who headed Long Island's McCarthy for President Committee, wrote a letter inviting Lowenstein to run for office in the Fifth Congressional District, to represent the liberal Long Beach area. A Yale-trained lawyer, Lowenstein was teaching law at the City University of New York at the time. ``He accepted the offer in a matter of days,'' recalled Shaffer, who had been searching for a strong antiwar candidate.

Lowenstein won a bitter primary battle with another antiwar candidate, but after winning election in the fall, he served just one term. By 1970, however, he had become the personification of peaceful protest across the country, a distinction he retained until his violent death in 1980. At the age of 51, he was shot to death in his mid-Manhattan office by a mentally unstable assassin, Dennis Sweeney, a former friend and colleague in the civil rights movement.

During Lowenstein's term in Congress, the antiwar movement engulfed Long Island. Demonstrations sponsored by the Long Island Peace Coalition became a matter of routine. There were rallies in village parks and on the main streets of Long Island. Many protesters were in their teens and early 20s, drawn into political action for the first time.

Freeport citizens, for instance, gathered every Sunday in 1967 and 1968 for a silent peace vigil at the local post office. Just before New Hampshire's primary in 1968, Huntington's Resistance Against the War held a large rally on the Village Green. An often-seen sign read: ``We Condemn the Illegal War.'' Members of Women Strike for Peace often were in the forefront. At the Smith Haven Mall, mothers held a continuing peace vigil. High school students carried placards reading: ``Stop the Bloody Massacre.''

In 1969, students picketed the Manhasset draft board with signs that read ``Stop the Nixon Death Lottery.'' In 1970, after the Kent State killings, Long Island colleges held ``alternative'' classes and high school students joined a candlelight procession to Oyster Bay Town Hall. The antiwar debate had spread to almost every corner of Long Island, dividing communities, families and generations.

In the late '60s, there were also rallies to counter the growing protest. In 1967, older veterans marched outside a Pete Seeger concert carrying signs that read: ``Support Our Boys in Vietnam.'' At Hempstead Village Hall, demonstrators gathered to cheer young men reporting for army induction.

But the antiwar sentiment continued to grew until the war came to an end in 1975. By then, 547 Long Island residents were officially listed as killed in action. In Congress, Lowenstein did not survive his 1970 re-election bid, when he was branded the ``Viet Cong-ressman'' by supporters of Republican Norman Lent. Two years later, the state Legislature had redrawn district lines to break up the Long Beach coalition of Jewish and black voters. Lowenstein, then 43, did not give up the dream of returning to Congress and, unsuccessfully, entered six more contests, on Long Island and in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Many voters considered Lowenstein too radical, his backers said; It was an ironic fate for a man committed to seeking change within the system. But for activists on Long Island, Lowenstein remains a vivid memory.

Nancy Mitzman still reveres the lessons Lowenstein taught. Just 30 when she joined Women Strike for Peace in 1968, she attended countless rallies, gathered signatures on endless petitions, entered into numerous neighborhood debates.

``Allard Lowenstein was such a good teacher, showing people how to have a direct influence on their government -- and we saw it really could work,'' said Mitzman, now 60 and living in Blue Point. ``My husband and I felt we were living through a time of enormous change, really taking part in democracy. It was such a hopeful period, because the war did end, perhaps sooner than it might have.''

Later, the protest movement drew women like Mitzman into mainstream politics. ``Some of us went on to found the Suffolk Women's Political Caucus, and many of us continue to try to improve our communities.'' It was another product of the protest era, she said.

For Michael D'Innocenzo, a Hofstra history professor who was teaching on campus when Lowenstein made his post-Kent State talk, the congressman left a powerful legacy. ``He could make people understand complex issues,'' D'Innocenzo said. ``His extraordinary achievement was putting together a mainstream movement as an alternative when so many people were ready to dump both political parties.''