Time's cover story the weekend of October 15, 1965 was "The Turning Point In Vietnam." The Berkeley Barb counter-headlined: "VDC Shatters War 'Consensus,' Greatest Antiwar Protest Ever, UC Center Of Worldwide Action." A proposal from the Berkeley chapter of the Vietnam Day Committee had grown into a coordinated event in twenty countries. Of the two American demonstrations, one was going to be in Berkeley.

As it was planned, there would be speakers and antiwar folksingers all day Friday, then an afternoon march on the army induction center in Oakland, followed by an all-night vigil and more speakers on Saturday. Some 14,000 people came for the event from scores of western cities, whole busloads from Los Angeles and Portland. Some of them had sat since morning in a vacant lot on the University of California campus hearing the war denounced by student and labor radicals and a slate of antiwar writers. Ken Kesey was scheduled in a superstar time slot, just a speaker or two before the march was to start.

The VDC organizers who put together the anitwar cheerleader lineup could not have been up-to-date on Kesey's recent interests.

He came with a load of Pranksters in the familiar old bus, painted blood-red for the occasion and covered with nationalist symbols: swastikas, hammers and sickles, rising suns, stars of David, the Great Seal of the United States, the American eagle. To the VDC's horror, Kesey's speech to the crowd just minutes before the march consisted of a soft-spoken meditation on the similarity between the antiwar movement and the military, punctuated by passages on the harmonica. The VDC couldn't wait for him to get offstage so they could get another speaker up there to sustain a militant mood for the march.

—Charles Perry

[video:https://youtu.be/Vx606E2OzPE]