Clara Bingham is the author of "Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found its Soul." The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. View more opinion articles on CNN.

(CNN) Friday, November 15 will go down in history as day two of the public impeachment hearings of President Donald Trump, but it also happens to be the 50th anniversary of one of the biggest mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War — the Moratorium March on Washington.

More than 500,000 young, antiwar demonstrators flooded the streets of Washington in the largest ever single peace protest in American history at the time. It seemed as if all of America's youth had poured into the city to personally send the message of "Hell no, we won't go" to President Richard Nixon.

Clara Bingham

The Moratorium March on Washington came a month after the October 15 Peace Moratorium when 2 million people in cities and towns across the country took the day off to recite the names of the war dead, hold teach-ins and vigils, and march. Life magazine described it as "the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country." America was on a cliff's edge of a revolution. Thousands took to the streets, traveled the country, organized, gave speeches, and disrupted their everyday lives for many years to stop a war that they believed was unjust.

The sheer brawn required to organize the two moratoriums in an age before cell phones and the web was nothing short of heroic. The speakers included senators like George McGovern and famous activists like Coretta Scott King but the music by Peter, Paul, and Mary, Richie Havens, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and the cast of Hair is what everyone listened to.

I can't help but think of the historic parallels. We had a madman in the White House then, and an even madder one now. We had a corrupt President who had hired thugs to spy on his Democratic opponents then, we now have a corrupt President who has asked a foreign country to sabotage his political opponent. Of course, the ravages of the bloody, unwinnable war and the draft that threatened the lives of more than 20 million young men who were eligible to be drafted turned out to be the ultimate motivational tool. There's nothing like looking death in the eye to spur on political action. In 1969 and 1970 alone, nearly 18,000 American soldiers were killed.

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