The antiwar movement against Vietnam in the US from 1965-1971
was the most significant movement of its kind in the nation's history.
The United States first became directly involved in Vietnam in 1950
when President Harry Truman started to underwrite the costs of
France's war against the Viet Minh. Later, the presidencies of Dwight
Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy increased the US's political, economic,
and military commitments steadily throughout the fifties and early
sixties in the Indochina region. Prominent senators had already begun
criticizing American involvement in Vietnam during the summer of
1964, which led to the mass antiwar movement that was to appear in the
summer of 1965. This antiwar movement had a great impact on policy and
practically forced the US out of Vietnam.
Starting with teach-ins during the spring of 1965, the massive
antiwar efforts centered on the colleges, with the students playing
leading roles. These teach-ins were mass public demonstrations,
usually held in the spring and fall seasons. By 1968, protesters
numbered almost seven million with more than half being white youths
in the college. The teach-in movement was at first, a gentle approach
to the antiwar activity. Although, it faded when the college students
went home during the summer of 1965, other types of protest that grew
through 1971 soon replaced it. All of these movements captured the
attention of the White House, especially when 25,000 people marched on
Washington Avenue. And at times these movements attracted the interest
of all the big decision-makers and their advisors (Gettleman, 54).
The teach-ins began at the University of Michigan on March 24,
1965, and spread to other campuses, including Wisconsin on April 1.
These protests at some of America's finest universities captured
public attention. The Demonstrations were one form of attempting to go
beyond mere words and research and reason, and to put direct pressure
on those who were conducting policy in apparent disdain for the will
expressed by the voters (Spector, 30-31). Within the US government,
some saw these teach-ins as an important development that might slow
down on further escalation in Vietnam. Although several hundred
colleges experienced teach-ins, most campuses were untouched by this
circumstance.
Nevertheless, the teach-ins did concern the administration and
contributed to President Johnson's decision to present a major Vietnam
address at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965. The address
tried to respond to the teach-ins campus protest activity. The Johns
Hopkins speech was the first major example of the impact of antiwar.
Johnson was trying to stabilize public opinion while the campuses were
bothering the government.
In 1965, the US started strategically bombing parts of
Northern Vietnam, catalyzing the antiwar movement public opinion of
what was going on in Indochina. These bombings spawned the antiwar
movement and sustained it, especially as the North Vietnamese leader
Ho Chi Minh refused to listen to American demands (VN History and
Politics). The antiwar movement would have emerged alone by the
bombings, and the growing cost of American lives coming home in body
bags only intensified public opposition to the war (VN H. and P.).
This movement against the Northern bombings, and domestic critics in
general, played a role in the decision to announce a bombing pause
from May 12 to the 17, of 1965.
Antiwar activists carried on through the pause with their own
programs, and the scattered teach-ins had become more of a problem for
President Johnson when their organizers joined in an unofficial group,
the Inter-University Committee for a Public Hearing on Vietnam. This
new committee began planning a nationwide teach-in to be conducted on
television and radio, of which would be a debate between protesters
and administrators of the government. The antiwar movement, through
the national teach-in, contributed to the resignations of many
government officials, including the resignation of McGeorge Bundy in
early 1966. This well-publicized debate made the antiwar effort more
respectable.
As supporters of the war found themselves more popular, they
were driven increasingly to rely on equating their position with
"support for our boys in Vietnam." (Brown, 34). The antiwar movement
spread directly among the combat troops in Vietnam, who began to wear
peace symbols and flash peace signs and movement salutes. Some units
even organized their own demonstrations to link up with the movement
at home (Schlight, 45). For example, to join the November 1969 antiwar
Mobilization, a unit boycotted its Thanksgiving Day dinner (Schlight,
45). One problem of the antiwar movement was the difficulty of finding
ways to move beyond protest and symbolic acts to deeds that would
actually impede the war. Unlike college students and other civilians,
the troops in Vietnam had no such problem. Individual acts of
rebellion, raging from desertion to killing officers who ordered
search-and-destroy missions, merged into mutinies and large-scale
resistance. (Sclight, 45).
Between the late summer of 1965 and the fall of 1966, the
American military effort in Vietnam accelerated from President
Johnson's decisions. The number of air sorties over Northern Vietnam
now increased again, from 25,000 in 1965 to 79,000 in 1966. The
antiwar movement grew slowly during this period and so did the number
of critics in Congress and the media. A ban on picketing the White
House was recommended. Instead, President Johnson and later Nixon
combated the picketers through a variety of legal and illegal
harassment, including limiting their numbers in certain venues and
demanding letter-perfect permits for every activity. (Gettleman, 67).
The picketers were a constant battle, which the presidents could never
claim total victory.
By 1967, US military authority was breaking apart. Not only
was it the worst year for President Johnson's term, but also one of
the most turbulent years in all of American history. The war in
Southeast Asia and the war at home in the streets and the campuses
dominated the headlines and the attention of the White House. To make
matters worse, 1967 witnessed more urban riots; the most deadly of
which took place in Detroit. It was also the year of the hippies, the
drugs, and a wholesale assault on morality and values; and all of
these singular happenings were magnified by the media. (VN H. and P.).
The antiwar effort was crippling Johnson's presidency and paralyzing
the nation.
Now the war was becoming more unpopular at home. By the middle
of 1967, many Americans began telling that the original involvement in
Vietnam had been a costly mistake. And for Johnson, only a little more
than a quarter of the population approved of his handling the war in
1968. Many of those fed up at home were the hawks. The hawks were the
group of people that supported the war. They wanted to remove the
shackles from the generals and continue the bombings over Vietnam.
However, Johnson's critics among the doves were far more troubling.
The doves were usually blue-collar workers and wanted to end Vietnam
immediately. In the first place, they were far more vocal and visible
than the hawks, appearing at large, well-organized demonstrations.
Even more disconcerting were the continuing defections from the media
and the Democratic Party. The antiwar movement that began as a small
trickle had now became a flood (Small, 101). The most important
antiwar event of 1967 was the March on the Pentagon in October, which
was turning point for the Johnson administration. With public support
for Johnson's conduct of the war fading, the president fought back by
overselling modest gains that his military commanders claimed to be
making. This overselling of the war's progress played a major role in
creating the domestic crisis produced by the Tet Offensive in early
1968, sparked from the protesters' actions. Although these marchers
were unable to levitate the besieged Pentagon, their activities
ultimately contributed to the redirection of the American policy in
Vietnam by 1968-and the destruction of the presidency of Lyndon
Johnson (VN H. and P.).
Johnson finally realized-the energized antiwar forces spelled
the beginning of the end for American involvement in the war. (VN
H. and P. ). Thus, the administration dug in for a long and dramatic
time of protests, uncivil disobedience, and numerous arrests. The size
of these demonstration crowds often varied but there were no
disagreements about the major events of protest. They began with
peaceful series of speeches and musical presentations. Then many of
the participants tried to march the various government grounds, most
importantly taking place at the Lincoln Memorial. For most Americans,
the events were symbolized by television images of dirty-mouthed
hippies taunting the brave, clean-cut American soldiers who confronted
the unruly demonstrators (VN H. and P.).
Americans were soon shocked to learn about the communists'
massive Tet Offensive on January 31, 1968. The offensive demonstrated
that Johnson had been making the progress in Vietnam seem much greater
than it really was; the war was apparently endless. Critics of the
administration policy on the campuses and Capitol Hill had been right
after all. For the first time, the state of public opinion was the
crucial factor in decision making on the war. Johnson withdrew his
candidacy for reelection in March of 1968, and he was offering the
communists generous terms to open peace talks.
In the meantime, as the war continued to take its bloody toll,
the nation prepared to elect a new president. The antiwar movement had
inadvertently helped Richard Nixon win the election. As Johnson's
unhappy term of office came to an end, antiwar critics and the
Vietnamese people prepared to do battle with their new adversary
(Small, 124). The new president expressed more outward signs from
hawks not the doves, now that Johnson now out of office. Like many of
his advisors, Nixon was bothered with the antiwar movement since he
was convinced that it prolonged the war. He could not understand
how the current generation of young people could include both brave
young marines and hippies and draft-card burners (VN H. and P.).
Richard Nixon assumed the presidency with a secret plan to end the
war. Although most doves did not believe in the new president to do
so, they were prepared to give him time to execute the plan. Nixon had
a plan to end the war. He wanted to increase the pressure on the
communists, issue then a deadline to be conciliatory, and to keep this
entire secret from the American public (VN H. and P.). Thus, the
number of casualties increased in the late winter and spring as the
bombings of Northern Vietnam continued once again.
It did not take long for the antiwar critics and organization
to take up where it had left off with Lyndon Johnson. They got ready
for another campaign of petitioning and demonstrating with the center
of it all involving the middle-class. The deadline for the communists
past, and the failure to follow with his strategy was the rejuvenation
of the antiwar movement centered on the very successful demonstrations
in October of 1969. Nixon now feared that the public, led by a
confident antiwar movement, would demand a much quicker withdrawal
from Vietnam than he had planned. With that deadline approached, Henry
Kissinger, the most important Vietnam policymaker asked a group of
Quakers to give Nixon six months, if the war is not over then, "You
can come back and tear down the White House." (VN H. and P.).
In May 1970, Nixon gambled that he could buy time for
Vietnamization through an attack on Cambodian sanctuaries to destroy
communist command-and-supply buildings, while containing the protest
that he knew his action would provoke. His gamble failed, when poorly
trained National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State
University, on May 4. This made the expected protests much worse than
anyone in Washington could have foreseen. The wave of demonstrations
on hundreds of college campuses paralyzed America's higher-education
system. The Kent State tragedy ignited a nationwide campus disaster.
Between May 4 and May 8, campuses experienced an average of 100
demonstrations a day, 350 campus strikes, 536 colleges shut down, and
73 colleges reported significant violence in their protests. On that
weekend, 100,000 people gathered to protest in Washington. By May 12,
over 150 colleges were on strike (VN H. and P.)
Many of Nixon's activities during the second week of May
revolved around the Kent State crisis. On May 6, he met with the
delegation of the university. But with the storm of people on the
outside of the White House, the government never completely stopped.
Despite Nixon's claims that the media did not portray his serious
intentions accurately, his own records reveal almost no discussion of
Vietnam, Cambodia, or Kent State at the time. On December 15, Nixon
announced his intention to withdraw an additional fifty thousand
troops in 1970. Even the president's faith in that position was
shattered after the unprecedented nationwide protests against his
invasion of Cambodia in the spring of 1970. (Lewis, 83).
As the Nixon administration tried to piece together in the
weeks after the crisis, a dramatic decline in antiwar occurred once
the colleges closed. The nationwide response to the Cambodian invasion
and the Kent State killings was the last movement by the people, which
had such an impact like the summer of 1970. Nixon began to plan a new
and even more vigorous offensive against the movement. However, Nixon
and his aides still felt undersized during the summer of 1970-from the
media, movement, and Congress.
For whatever reasons, campus demonstrations and general
antiwar activity declined after the spring of 1970. The number and
size of marches and protests declined as reported by the mass media.
For Nixon, the nation was full with marches, strikes, boycotts, and
other forms of activism during the last two years of his
administration. Some protesting still lingered, and in the late summer
on August 7, 1970, when a young researcher at the University of
Wisconsin was killed when the building in which he was working was
fire bombed. But the Dove rallies were poorly attended; the movement
was winding down. It was not just that the movement was doing poorly,
as Nixon himself was doing much better, becoming a popular Democratic
spokesperson. On September 16, he appeared to cheering crowds at
Kansas State University.
The antiwar movement figured indirectly in the outcome of
Vietnam. After Saigon fell, the Watergate affair crippled Nixon's
presidency and dominated his political life until his resignation in
August 1974. During this period, he was far too weak to contest with
Congress over a renewal of American military involvement in Vietnam.
As the crisis in Southern Vietnam now deepened in the middle of 1974,
the new president, Gerald Ford, wanted to increase military aide to
the faltering Saigon regime. Congress refused his requests to what it
saw as pouring more money and lives away. Continuing in 1974 to 1975,
the public with the movement, led by Congress and the media, all
influenced the arguments presented to more financial and military
commitments in Vietnam. The struggle of the American minds was over,
for there would be no more Vietnams in the near future. ( VN H. and
P.).
Among the most convincing theories of the movement were that
it exerted pressures directly on Johnson and Nixon it contributed to
the end of their policies. The movement exerted pressures indirectly
by turning the public against the war. It encouraged the Northern
Vietnamese to fight on long enough to the point that Americans
demanded a withdrawal from Southeast Asia; it influenced American
political and military strategy; and, slowed the growth of the hawks.
It is now clear that the antiwar movement and antiwar criticism in the
media and Congress had a significant impact on Vietnam. It's key
points being the mass demonstrations by the college students across
the country and the general public opposition to the war effort in
Vietnam. At times, some of their activities, as displayed by the
media, may have produced a patriotic backlash. (Gaullucci, 194).
Overall, the movement eroded support for Johnson and Nixon, especially
by the informed public. Through constant dissident, experts in the
movement, the media, and the campuses helped to destroy the knee-jerk
notion that "they in Washington have created." (Small 164 ). Thus,
from the beginning of the US involvement in Indochina's affairs, the
antiwar movement in the US from 1965-1971 was the most significant
movement of its kind in the nation's history.
---
Bibliography
Brown, McAfee, et al. Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience. New York:
Association Press, 1967
Gaullucci, Robert L. Neither Peace Nor Honor. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1975.
Gettleman, Marvin E. Vietnam and America: A documented history. New
York: Grove Press, 1985.
Lewis, Lloyd B. The Tainted War. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood
Press, 1985.
Meyerson, Joel D. Images of a Lengthy War. Washington, DC: Library of
Congress Cataloging in Publication Data, 1986.
Schlight, John. Indochina War Symposium. Washington DC: US Government
Printing Office, 1986.
Small, Melvin. Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1988.
Spector, Ronald H. "Researching the Vietnam Experience" Historical
Analysis Series. April1984: 30-31.
VN History and Politics
Rpt. Http://wwwpersonal.umich.edu:80/~hpp/hispo.html 1996
