DOVES IN A HAWK’S NEST : It May Be Losing Most of the Battles, but the Growing Orange County Peace Movement Could Yet Win Its War

For the past nine years, Jean Bernstein has spent nearly every Saturday at the corner of Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue in Laguna Beach, brandishing anti-nuclear banners and exhorting beachgoers to sign pacifist petitions.

With a small band of fellow demonstrators, Bernstein has conducted what Orange County activists contend is Southern California’s longest-running peace vigil--an effort that is a barometer of county reaction to the push for peace and justice.

In early years, Bernstein recalls, cars sometimes would swerve to come near the activists. Recently, she says, there has been a marked change, and protesters now receive more “thumbs up” greetings than “middle-finger” salutes.

As the Alliance for Survival enters its 10th year, the Orange County peace movement is receiving support where once there was hostility or, at best, a studied lack of interest. There has been a proliferation of peace organizations offering everything from “crystal therapy” to civil disobedience as means to push peace, justice and nuclear disarmament. The groups attract an equally wide array of supporters: at one extreme are those who believe that global prayer can change the “vibrational” status of the earth and bring peace, and at the other are those like Thomas Tierney, a Republican businessman who says “you can go from carrying the big stick to the Gandhi philosophy, and they both work.”

Although the movement today is entrenched in the county and beginning to enjoy broad-based support, major questions remain about its effectiveness--whether it influences legislation, has an impact on elections or raises the area’s consciousness about peace, disarmament and a non-nuclear world.

Thomas A. Fuentes, for one, is skeptical.

“The people of Orange County have voted overwhelmingly to send to Congress a very strong conservative Republican delegation to the House of Representatives,” the county Republican Party chairman said. “All of the members of that delegation are very much advocates of peace through strength and very articulate spokesmen for our national defense.”

Only a handful of Orange County residents are represented by the peace activists, said Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove), describing the peace movement as “not a point of view that has an impact on modern American life.”

On Monday, peace demonstrators will gather at the Westin South Coast Plaza for their fifth annual protest of the Winter Conference on Aerospace and Electronics Systems (Wincon), a weapons convention based at the U. S. Marine Corps Air Station in El Toro that this year focuses on such topics as “Surveillance and Targeting for Violent Peace.”

Activism Not New

Such activism is nothing new to California, which has launched movements pushing everything from free speech to increased human potential. But it stands out in Orange County, a conservative stronghold where voters put Ronald Reagan in the White House by a greater margin than anywhere in the nation.

Welcome to the peace movement “behind,” as one activist puts it, “the Orange Curtain,” where success is often not much different from failure, where activists rely on small victories to keep them going, and where working for peace often takes the form of “preventive” action rather than definable reform.

“It’s a slow, long process,” said Bernstein, a founder of the Alliance for Survival, the oldest peace group in the county. Organizing for peace here “takes a lot of patience. It takes a lot of repetition. It takes a willingness to accept that this is probably going to be a lifetime involvement.”

Orange County’s economic evolution is one reason why a movement that espouses an end to the arms race is not well received. The aerospace industry, which arrived soon after World War II, today makes up nearly 10% of the county’s economy.

Because the aerospace industry is not all defense based, it is difficult to gauge the exact impact of defense on the county’s economy. As of last November, the aerospace industry here supplied 90,900 jobs, 8.7% of all jobs in Orange County, with a total annual payroll of $3 billion, or 13.3% of the total payroll for county firms, said Alta Yetter Gale, an Orange County labor market analyst for the state Employment Development Department.

Gale estimates that the defense industry is about a $3-billion venture in the county by itself because a “certain portion of non-defense (manufacturing) does go for defense purposes. . . . The military does buy boots for their soldiers.”

Voting Hawkish

Orange County is also hawkish, pollsters have found.

The 1984 Orange County Annual Survey conducted by UC Irvine, which included questions on national issues, showed that nearly 29% of the county residents polled said that they favored increasing U. S. military spending, compared with only 12% nationally.

And this bent is played out in the voting booth. In 1980, Orange County favored Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter by a 68%-23% ratio, the largest for any county in the nation. In 1984, Reagan defeated Walter Mondale by a margin of 75%-24.3% in Orange County, again one of Reagan’s greatest margins nationwide. And the county’s congressional delegation advocates what local GOP chairman Fuentes calls “peace through strength.”

Still, it was between 1980 and 1984--the years of the so-called Republican Renaissance--that the Alliance for Survival made its greatest inroads in the county. Since 1984, the movement as a whole has grown substantially.

In 1980, the Alliance was one of two or three peace groups organizing in the county. Today, there are between 25 and 30, according to an estimate by Marion Pack, executive director of the Alliance for Survival. In 1983, UC Irvine began offering an academic minor in global peace and conflict studies. Since then, it has established an endowed peace studies chair, and plans are under way to construct an on-campus peace institute for research and instruction.

Great Peace March

Orange County sent 30 residents on the Great Peace March last March; about 20 of them completed the bulk of the cross-country trek, which ended in Washington last November. In six weeks, the Laguna Beach City Council will consider whether to declare the city a nuclear-free zone.

Pack contends that such action is in response to the Reagan Administration’s emphasis on having a strong military.

“I think Ronald Reagan did a lot for the peace movement in a lot of ways,” Pack said. “He took people’s concerns out of the closet, and they said, ‘I’ve got to do something about this guy right now.’ So we have a peace movement in spite of a conservative attitude.”

She adds: “Here in Orange County we have a strong peace movement in spite of the conservative atmosphere because yuppies have finally realized that nuclear war is bad for your Porsche.”

One unlikely supporter of the movement is Tierney, a former Air Force officer who now is president of a Tustin vitamin manufacturing company. Tierney and his wife, Elizabeth, donated $350,000 to UC Irvine to fund the peace studies chair and the proposed peace institute. He attributes the growth of the movement to “a maturity in Orange County that didn’t exist 10 years ago.”

But Tim Carpenter, who helped found the Alliance and organize the peace march, says fear of a nuclear holocaust fuels the county’s disarmament sentiments. “I think that the bottom line is people now are scared and are not afraid to admit it,” he said. “And that’s the biggest leap in the country and in the county.”

Orange County was no stranger to anti-war protests during the Vietnam era. But, like the rest of the country, peace efforts here became dormant in the mid-1970s, as U. S. intervention in Vietnam ended and the nation longed for quiet.

Vigil Began in 1977

But in 1977, a small grass-roots effort began in Laguna Beach. Bernstein and a group of friends, who were concerned about peace and the San Onofre nuclear power plant, began their vigil at Coast Highway and Ocean Avenue.

They handed out leaflets and gathered names and addresses of interested passers-by. By April, 1978, they had enough names, Bernstein said, to hold a meeting at Laguna Beach High School. About 75 people attended, and the Laguna Beach Alliance for Survival chapter began.

At about the same time, the Orange County Peace Conversion Project began lobbying to get military manufacturing converted over to peaceful production. Then in 1979, the core cooling system at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pa., broke down in the worst commercial nuclear accident in American history.

The near meltdown alerted the public to the potential hazards of nuclear power and sent converts flocking to the anti-nuclear movement nationwide. By early 1980, as Alliance for Survival chapters began to spring up outside of Laguna Beach, the group set up a central headquarters and forged a countywide presence.

For several years, the Alliance and one or two other Orange County organizations stumped for peace and a nuclear-free world without much support. They honed strategies to reach their affluent audience and worked to attract attention to their issues.

Demonstrations Organized

The Alliance distributed leaflets at homes and aerospace firms and organized demonstrations at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and other military targets. Members with a bent for civil disobedience landed in local jails.

By 1984, the few Orange County peace organizations had been joined by other groups, and today the spectrum of peace events and organizational styles is so wide that almost anyone with the desire to oppose the arms race can find a compatible group to do it with.

Although it is impossible to describe each of the county’s peace groups here, a random sampling follows:

- Representatives from a dozen congregations formed the Interfaith Peace Ministry in 1980 to organize programs for peace and social justice at churches and temples countywide. More than 100 congregations now have some organized peace activity, from study groups to prayer vigils.

“Churches are involved in the peace issue because it is a faith issue,” said Sue Montano Fenwick, executive director of the group. “If people affirm the fact that this world is God’s, we have the responsibility to see that it is not destroyed.”

- In its five years of operation, Concerned Citizens for Peace of Leisure World in Laguna Hills has grown from about 100 to more than 500 members, many of whom are attracted to activism in part because they see a growing military budget taking revenues away from people on fixed incomes.

Others were activists before their retirement and continue their efforts by campaigning for peace and justice within their community of 22,000. Members have also protested at the Seal Beach Naval Weapons station and previous Wincon conventions.

“I’m trying to remember when I first had tomatoes thrown at me,” mused Don Bridgman, a longtime member. “It must have been the 1930s, at a rally for Upton Sinclair for governor. . . . You know, old activists never die; they just join Concerned Citizens.”

- Beyond War, a well-financed Palo Alto-based group, sent Phyllis and John Kidd to Orange County three years ago to organize for peace. The Kidds, who live in Irvine, were sent here because the peace movement was growing, Phyllis Kidd said, and the organization believed there was enough interest in the county to support a chapter. With its low-key style and moderate-to-conservative bent, it reaches an audience not previously tapped.

“Most of the people (in Beyond War) are white, well-educated and middle-class, if not upper middle-class, and there’s a high level of professionals,” Phyllis Kidd said. “We are not radicals.”

Beyond War’s mission is education, mostly done in small gatherings in private homes. The group contends that if enough people are convinced that war is obsolete and all life is connected, they will act accordingly.

- The local peace movement is also sprinkled with holistic, “wellness” communities that believe world peace cannot be reached until individuals attain inner peace.

The El Toro-based Healix Center, which offers classes and information on meditation, planetary healing, metaphysics and crystal therapy--the use of crystals such as amethyst and quartz to focus healing energy into individuals to help them attain inner peace--is one such group. At 3:30 a.m. last Dec. 31, about 250 people gathered at the center, joining millions worldwide in an hour of prayer for global peace.

Jan Fisher is a registered nurse affiliated with the center who says the clients she sees “want to create a balance between the material and spiritual and work toward inner peace. . . . When 10% of the world is peaceful, there will be a vibrational shift in the energy field that surrounds the planet Earth” and peace will prevail.

Whether or not the various peace groups are making headway is another question.

Marion Pack has the grandest view of the movement’s success, for she credits peace activists nationwide with the survival of the world today: “I would say one of the tangible successes is the fact that we (the human race) are still here.”

Most other proponents take a narrower view.

“In Orange County, it was easy to measure success,” Carpenter said. “Success was if we (the Alliance for Survival) survived from day to day. . . . You really have to take joy in the little victories.”

And to Carpenter, the list of “little victories” is long: An estimated 3,000 people give $15 a year to subscribe to the Peace Conversion Times, the Alliance newspaper. Three cities in the county voted to pass the state Nuclear Freeze Initiative in 1982; although the measure lost in the county, it passed statewide in part because of support from Laguna Beach, Irvine and Costa Mesa. And although peace candidate Carol Ann Bradford failed to unseat Rep. Robert E. Badham (R-Newport Beach), she was able to raise $100,000 to finance her run for Congress.

“Ten years ago, this wouldn’t have happened,” Carpenter said.

The key to stumping for peace in Orange County is that “you have to wrestle with your definition of winning and losing,” Bernstein said. “If your ballot measure goes down to defeat, but you have managed to raise the issue in the minds of many, many people through your campaign, you have to put that on the side of winning. . . .”

Most critics, however, will not allow peace activists to snatch these little victories from the jaws of defeat. Even those who are predisposed to sympathy can find drawbacks in the movement’s efforts here.

By throwing its support behind Bradford and Mary Lou Brophy in two 1984 Congressional races, the peace movement squandered an opportunity to marshal its support behind former Rep. Jerry Patterson (D-Garden Grove), said John R. Hanna, chairman of the Orange County Democratic Central Committee.

Patterson had a greater chance of being elected than either Bradford or Brophy, Hanna said, but he lost the 38th Congressional District to Dornan, and “now they have no voice in Washington.”

“Their education campaign is a success,” Hanna said. “But what I think they need to do is to translate that into electoral success.”

Orange County’s Republican hierarchy is less charitable. The fact that voters here continue to return hawkish Republican congressmen to office is proof that the peace movement “is rather inconsequential in the overall political activity of the county,” said the Republican Party’s Fuentes.

“We view the Republican agenda and national policy as . . . peace through strength,” Fuentes said. “The Orange County community has endorsed that political philosophy.”

Dornan, a vocal defender of increased defense spending, contends that the peace movement “represents 1% of the population of the county.”

“That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate their St. Francis of Assisi approach to things, but it doesn’t mean they’re a serious part of politics,” Dornan said. “The so-called peace movement is a disarmament lobby that’s irrelevant in this country.”

Such criticism is no surprise to peace advocates in the county, and some agree that there is a need to branch out now that the movement enjoys increasing support.

“There are no elected officials in Orange County . . . who have been at all helpful to the peace and justice movement,” Tim Carpenter said. “But by 1988 and 1992, our elected officials will begin to reflect the will of the people here. . . . While we’ve grown in the last 10 years and put a face on the peace movement in Orange County, in the next 10 years we have to translate that into electoral victories.”