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460 rounds of ammunition at the windows of the dormitory where one of the killings took place. (The second student was shot dead on a nearby street as he carried milk home from a grocery store.) The shots by law enforcement officers shattered
every
window on one side of the dormitory. As at Kent State, no one was ever convicted for the killings.
    Â â€¢Â The Friday after the killings at Kent State, scores of students were bludgeoned in New York’s financial district by hundreds of construction workers who rampaged through the streets attacking students with crowbars and other heavy tools wrapped in American flags. They did so as the students sang at a peaceful noon vigil at a day of mourning called for by New York mayorJohn Lindsay to honor the slain Kent State students. To prevent the people they injured from receiving medical care, the construction workers—most of them were from the building site of the Twin Towers—yanked down a Red Cross banner outside an emergency clinic that had been hastily set up at Trinity Church by New York University doctors. WhenMichael Belknap, a lawyer with the Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, tried to help a bleeding student, he was knocked down and stomped on his back by construction workers. “Someone yelled, ‘He’s a commie bastard. We ought to kill him,’ ” Belknap told a reporter. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that financial district workers threw streams of ticker tape anddata processing punch cards from their windows in celebration of the violence taking place in the streets below.
    Â â€¢Â Twenty-two of those New York construction workers were honored at the White House a few weeks later by President Nixon. He thanked them for showing their patriotism the day they beat students. He gave them flag lapel pins, and they gave him a yellow hard hat like the ones they wore the day they assaulted students, seventy of whom were seriously injured.
    Â â€¢Â Vice PresidentSpiro Agnew wrote a letter of thanks to the union official who organized the attacks on the students,Peter Brennan, head of theNew York City Building Trades Council. He congratulated him for his “impressive display of patriotism” the day of the attacks. When Nixon was reelected in 1972, the president rewarded Brennan, who was a leader of the movement to increase the number of labor Democrats who voted for Nixon in 1972, by appointing him secretary of labor.
    Â â€¢Â On August 24, 1970, a bomb exploded in front of Sterling Hall, a building that housed the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. A thirty-three-year-old physics researcher and father of three young children was killed and four people were injured. Three people were convicted for the crime and a fourth suspect is still being sought by the FBI.
    That was America in 1970.
    It was an extraordinary time in the life of the country. Not since the Civil War had Americans been so divided. Nearly all of the divisions were related to the war. It became clear that year that the war that had been tearing Vietnam apart for many years was now also tearing apart the soul of America—in the heartland and in the cities, from coast to coast. Frustrations were higher and hopes lower in the peace movement than they had been at any time. Many people wondered if this war, which by now in reports from Vietnam was often called a bloodbath, would end.
    People had been asking: Can there be peace in Vietnam? Now people also asked: Can there be peace at home?
    IT WAS IN 1970 , that mad time, to use Daniel Berrigan’s words, that Davidon became aware of another war: the war against dissent. As he moved from peace group to peace group that year, searching for more effectiveways to escalate opposition to war, he repeatedly heard a very troubling rumor. He heard it from people in various types of peace organizations—academic, scientific, religious, antidraft. They told him there