Description
Temporarily out of stock
Title: Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in the Streets and the Untold History of America’s Biggest Mass Arrest
Author: ROBERTS LAWRENCE
Format: HARDCOVER
Publication date: 01/06/2020
Imprint: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN
Price: $39.99
Publishing status: NOT YET PUBLISHED
A cinematic history of the largest act of civil disobedience in US history, in Richard Nixon’s
Washington.
They surged into Washington by the tens of thousands in the spring of 1971. Fiery radicals,
flower children, and militant vets gathered for the most audacious act in a years-long movement
to end America’s war in Vietnam: a blockade of the nation’s capital. And the White House,
headed by an increasingly paranoid Richard Nixon, was determined to stop it.
Longtime Washington journalist Lawrence Roberts, drawing on dozens of interviews, unexplored
public and private archives, and newfound White House transcripts, recreates the intense events
through the eyes of dueling characters. Woven into the story too are now-familiar names
including John Kerry, Jane Fonda, and Daniel Ellsberg, leaker of the Pentagon Papers. It began
with a bomb at the US Capitol – an unsolved case to which Roberts brings convincing new
evidence. To prevent the Mayday Tribe’s guerrilla-style traffic blockade, the government
mustered the army and marines. Riot squads swept through the city, arresting more than 12,000
people. As a young public defender led a thrilling legal battle to free the detainees, Nixon and his
men took their first steps down the road to the Watergate scandal and the implosion of the
presidency.
Mayday 1971 is the ultimately inspiring history of a season that forever changed the face of
protest in America.
ISBN: 9781328766724
Dimension: 229mm X 152mm