The Ultimate Confrontation

Jan Rose Kasmir (born in 1950) is a US high-school student who took part in the protest against America’s involvement in Vietnam in Washington DC where thousands of anti-war activists had gathered in front of The Pentagon on 21 October 1967 and was photographed by famous French photographer Marc Riboud.

The photo of Jan Rose Kasmir, with a flower in her hands and a kindly gaze in her eyes, standing in front of several rifle-wielding soldiers stationed to block the protesters became a well-known symbol of struggle for peace and non-violent resistance.

Jan Rose Kasmir at that time bounced from foster home to foster home in the nearby Maryland suburbs. "I was a good heart trying to follow the light," she recalled. "I just hopped on a D.C. transit bus and went down to join the revolution. None of this was planned. This was before we were all media savvy."

"All of a sudden, I realized 'them' was that soldier in front of me—a human being I could just as easily have been going out on a date with," Kasmir said. "It wasn't a war machine, it was just a bunch of guys with orders. Right then, it went from being a fun, hip trip to a painful reality."

Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin said "one of the reasons that photograph became famous is that there was an effort to talk to the soldiers, to convince them to throw down their guns and join us." Kazin, a fellow Pentagon protester in 1967, wrote the 2000 book America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. The protesters' plans ranged from the earnest to the absurd: organizer Abbie Hoffman held a mass exorcism, hoping to levitate the Pentagon 300 feet off the ground, turn it orange and vibrate out any evil spirits.

The rally didn't stop the war, of course, or even shut down the Pentagon. Instead, it resulted in some of the first violent clashes of the antiwar movement. Soldiers and federal agents lobbed tear gas into the crowds trying to force their way into the building. Six hundred eighty-one protesters were arrested, and dozens were beaten as they were pushed off the Pentagon's steps. The violence, memorably chronicled in novelist Norman Mailer's firsthand account, The Armies of the Night, focused the world's attention on the peace effort as never before.

Kasmir then became a massage therapist. Since 2001 she has been living in Aarhus, Denmark, with her 12-year-old daughter, Lisa Ann, and her Danish husband.

More than 30 years after the protest, a French newspaper tracked down Kasmir, and in February 2003 Marc Riboud followed her to a protest in London against the war in Iraq. She took with her a poster-size copy of the 1967 photograph and Riboud photographed her again.

External link

[http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Flower_Child.html Andrew Curry. "Flower Child", Smithsonian magazine, April 2004]