Despite the intense focus on Vietnam among their audience that summer evening, Peter, Paul and Mary did not intend for their playlist four years later to make a political point about the war. “We were not troubled by the surrounding events of the Gulf of Tonkin.” Vietnam had yet to “penetrate our consciousness as the debacle it was to become,” Peter Yarrow explained.40 The group performed “Puff, the Magic Dragon” before the song became a popular reference for both marijuana and napalm.
