In response to Nixon, the anti-war left began to organize a non-rational, symbolic response: multi-city marches and demonstrations, to be called the Moratorium Marches. Around the world, millions would participate, with half a million marching on Washington, D.C. Yet faced with such a massive chorus of rage and disapproval, Nixon effectively shrugged. “Under no circumstances,” he said, “will I be affected by [them].”
To raise money for the anti-war movement, a Los Angeles gallerist commissioned Jasper Johns to produce a poster. The war was, to the anti-war folk, so obviously corrupt; marshaling more arguments would be playing a rigged game. They didn’t need more thoughts. They needed a symbol that was so blatant that it was impossible to misunderstand, yet vague enough to lodge in the mind and irritate it. Hence, Johns produced a flag — another symbol so self-contained that it needed no definition — but unlike the red-white-and-blue flags he had painted a decade before, the Moratorium flag was distorted, sickly. — PBS, 2015
