Marching for Peace : 5,000 Volunteers Sought for Cross-Country Anti-Nuclear Trek in 1986

If it comes off as planned, it will be the largest, most ambitious demonstration in American history.

On March 1, 1986, so the plan goes, 5,000 people will leave their jobs and families and embark on a nine-month march across the country from Los Angeles. If all goes well, by the time they reach Washington 255 days later, they will have raised $15 million, will have been greeted by more Americans than all the 1984 Olympic torch-carriers combined and will have created nothing less than a new “moral force” in the United States.

It is called the Great Peace March. Its goal is simple: to force government leaders to eliminate--the group says “take down”--nuclear weapons. The march is the brainchild of a new organization called People Reaching Out for Peace, or PRO-Peace, which announced its formation at a sparsely attended news conference at the Los Angeles Press Club last week.

“We are here as PRO-Peace, a massive citizens’ organization that intends to create an atmosphere that will make it impossible for our leaders not to take nuclear weapons down,” said David Mixner, 38, a veteran organizer and political fund-raiser who is executive director of the group.

“We mean business. This is not a great event or an act of conscience. We believe there are moments in history when citizens can create a moral force to correct deep wrongs by deep sacrifice. We believe that time is now. We believe we can dramatically reduce, and maybe eliminate, nuclear weapons.”

More Marches Planned

PRO-Peace is not massive yet. It has one third-floor office near Beverly Center, a paid staff of 30 people and a bank account of $100,000 in donations. If the beginning of PRO-Peace seems modest, its vision does not.

PRO-Peace is already laying a follow-up strategy that could prompt similar marches in East Berlin or Moscow. At first glance, the effort might seem quixotic. But PRO-Peace has several advantages some social movements lack: political savvy, instantaneous access to fund-raising networks and a staggering sense of pure showmanship.

Mixner has worked on 50 political campaigns. He managed Tom Bradley’s 1977 campaign for mayor and co-chaired Sen. Gary F. Hart’s campaign for President last year. Mixner got into organizing as a teen-ager in the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He was one of the four founders of the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, which staged the huge nationwide anti-war protests of 1969 and 1970.

The backbone of Mixner’s staff is young professionals who have interrupted careers in government, law and other fields to work at PRO-Peace for a year. (One of Mixner’s favorite recruiting lines is: “If you really believed that you had the power to help deter nuclear war, would you give up a year of your life to try?” The answer, he said, is almost always yes.)

Mixner and his partner have donated his multimillion-dollar consulting and public affairs firm, Mixner-Scott, to their employees. The outgoing, admittedly overweight Mixner is also planning to lose 100 pounds before the walk. Unwilling to miss a single chance to raise money for the walk, he is already lining up donors who will contribute money for every pound he loses.

Although Mixner continues to handle some former clients, he works full time in the PRO-Peace office, where photographs of John F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. hang on the wall beside his desk.

The PRO-peace staff is organized in a manner similar to a professional political campaign: finance, advance work, communications, issues. Although the overwhelming number of staff members are Democrats, the organization considers itself nonpartisan. It plans to seek endorsements from public leaders, churches, peace groups and student body presidents at colleges.

PRO-Peace fund-raisers are tapping Southern California’s business and entertainment community. Actor Paul Newman has donated $25,000 to the new group. Orange County entrepreneur and developer David Stein, 36, a contributor to both Democratic and Republican candidates, is a co-chairman.

Natalie Swercheck, PRO-Peace finance director, said that designer Diane von Furstenberg is holding a major fund-raiser for the group in New York City this week and that singer Kenny Loggins has offered the proceeds of a future concert. Prominent artists will be pressed to create original art works for auctions and for reproduction as posters, she said. A large direct-mail appeal for donations is scheduled to start in May.

By next year, Mixner said, PRO-Peace expects to have six regional offices and a mailing list of 5 million to 10 million supporters.

‘Lining the Streets’

“We will have citizens lining the streets of Denver to meet us, more waving us on as we pass the missile silos in Nebraska,” he said.

“We hope thousands of farmers will lead us on farm equipment through Des Moines and thousands more will march with us across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan. Then there will be thousands, if not a million people, filling the streets of Washington next year, asking their leaders to take down nuclear weapons.”

Mixner and his staff members respond to questions about the admittedly grandiose scheme with the understated confidence of people who are accustomed to taking on projects that others say cannot be done.

When state Sen. John V. Briggs qualified the anti-gay Proposition 6 on the ballot in 1978, some supporters of homosexual rights thought that they would have to accept election defeat and fight the initiative later in court. Not Mixner. He persuaded then-retired Gov. Ronald Reagan to oppose the measure as an assault on civil rights. The amendment, which would have made it easier for school boards to fire homosexual teachers, lost by more than a million votes.

Melody Moore, head of the group’s Chicago office, said the staff’s attitude stems in part from their past successes. “In the past, we did stop a war,” she said. “People stood up and shouted to the politicians to stop a war, and they stopped it. This is going to take off like wildfire.”

Volunteers Sought

PRO-Peace is beginning to send out applications for volunteer marchers, who they hope will solicit sponsors to underwrite their walks with contributions. March director Stephen Perkins, 29, is arranging to move a small city of people across the country one day at a time.

“I’ve been reading up on covered wagon trains,” said Perkins, a landscape architect and former Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal. “We want to leave as ecologically clean a trail as possible.”

One full-time staff member is assigned exclusively to seeking the thousands of permits the marchers will need. The march will cover an average of 15 miles a day. A convoy of 50 trucks will carry most supplies. Walkers, who will have to pass physicals and undergo a month of training before the hike, will have the option of carrying backpacks that fold out for use as chairs.

The amenities have not been overlooked. Marchers will have their own tents with skylights, a mobile hospital, mail service and USO-style entertainment by celebrities from time to time. Perkins said he is negotiating with manufacturers for possible sponsorship of such products as shoes, tents and parkas.

In case the march does not immediately succeed where decades of disarmament talks and peace rallies have failed, PRO-Peace has additional plans for what the group hopes will be an “unrelenting movement” worldwide.

Civil Disobedience

In the spring of 1987, according to a PRO-Peace press packet, “Phase Two: The Civil Disobedience Effort” is to begin. More than 250,000 people around the country “will go to jail . . . in an atmosphere of unity and hope,” the press release says.

(PRO-Peace will not repeat some of the errors of the peace movements of the 1960s, Mixner said in an interview. It will not, he said, “be hostile or sound unpatriotic.” It will not, he added, become bogged down in the details of disarmament as anti-Vietnam War protesters became involved in Vietnamese politics.)

Phase Three is to be a march to Berlin by 25,000 West and East Germans, and one PRO-Peace staff member is beginning to organize it.

Another staff member is planning Phase Four, a still undefined strategy to use mass communications to encourage Soviet citizens to do whatever they can to put pressure on their leaders to eliminate their nuclear arms.

Asked at the press conference to explain his confidence in the project, Mixner answered:

“I can only say I have never, in all of my years of organizing, seen any project as easy to organize as this one. The people are ready, and they can do it. We cannot keep waiting for a knight in shining armor to save us. We’ve got to do it ourselves.”