ABSTRACT
There was a huge police presence, state police, in the Common. An Irish guy working for a telephone company gets a small house, lives in a community with his friends, and wants to send his kid to the local high school, cheer for the football team. It was beginning to change by the mid-1960s. In February 1965, the United States began bombing North Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of American troops were pouring into the country. The bombing of North Vietnam had gone on for months. It was a pretty big issue by then. Liberal intellectuals and scientists were advocating a barrier that would prevent North Vietnamese from coming to the south to support South Vietnamese guerrillas the United States was attacking. The liberal Congressmen who later presented themselves as anti-war—figures like Mike Mansfield and others—were bitterly condemning the demonstrators in April of 1966.
