Roberts tells the story superbly from start to finish ... With a talent for research and an eye for colorful detail, Mr. Roberts presents a lot of new and overlooked material ... Mr. Roberts’s default mode is to accept the notion that the protesters, with some exceptions, were essentially decent and right, while the administration was instinctively and invariably repressive and wrong. Because he sees the story—as he put it in a pre-publication interview—in terms of 'a government gone rogue [confronting] masses of citizens demanding change,' he never presents Nixon’s rationale for believing it was his constitutional duty to resist mob rule and keep the government open ... As a result of the Tribe’s failure to shut Washington down, Mayday has been paid less attention than other protests of the period, and its significance overlooked. Mr. Roberts’s first-rate book redresses that imbalance.
Roberts is a careful observer and he deftly organizes a complex, multifaceted series of events into a coherent, fast moving, and fascinating story ... This is a complex story with dozens of actors and events taking place simultaneously at different locations. Roberts effectively organizes the book by retelling the story through the eyes of several key participants ... Thanks to Roberts, we now have a better picture of what those long-ago protesters really accomplished.
Roberts relates the shameful story of what happened that year like a mystery writer. He even conveys firsthand experience as an arrested protester. Fortunately, Roberts is also a careful historian. He pinpoints the origins of this extraordinary drama and guides readers through the score ... Roberts begins with an introductory timeline and then weaves together the events and personalities as they unfurl prior to and after May 1st. His valuable book boasts impressive research, extensive footnotes, and a useful bibliography.
Roberts conveys the personal and political impact of a pivotal event in American history in a narrative that will engage readers of the time period and resonate with today’s social justice activists.
The events culminating with the mass arrests of 12,000 people in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1971 have been curiously underreported in most histories of the Vietnam era. Roberts changes that with this compelling history of Mayday 1971 ... Along with recounting the events and the government’s response, Roberts deftly integrates profiles of many individuals on all sides of the action ... Roberts has contributed a dramatic, heavily detailed account one of the major actions of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam ... The mass arrest of 12,000 'Mayday people' in their abortive attempt to tie up the capital, and their eventual release, is the centerpiece of this compelling story.
Roberts offers a perceptive, thoroughly researched accounting of the intense, often divisive movement ... Drawing on government and private archives, news articles, and many interviews with participants, Roberts creates a tense, brisk narrative covering 10 weeks that began in March with a bomb explosion in the U.S. Capitol and ended with lawyers’ efforts to free the thousands arrested. He offers sharply drawn portraits of key White House personnel and of many protestors ... A vivid history of passionate protest.
... vivid and deeply sourced ... Profiling protest leaders, as well as public defenders and police officials who protected the rule of law against Nixon’s anti-Mayday 'war council,' Roberts convincingly argues that the White House’s authoritarian attitudes and actions foreshadowed the Watergate scandal. Readers with an interest in protest movements, the history of Washington, D.C., and 1960s and ’70s counterculture will be rewarded by this comprehensive and accessible account.
