| Opposition to United States | |
| Partof: | counterculture of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War |
| Date: | 28 January 1965 – 29 March 1973 |
| Causes: | United States in the Vietnam War |
Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began with demonstrations in 1965 against the escalating role of the United States in the Vietnam War. These demonstrations grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years. This movement informed and helped shape the vigorous and polarizing debate, primarily in the United States, during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s on how to end the Vietnam War.
Many in the peace movement within the United States were children, mothers, or anti-establishment youth. Opposition grew with participation by the African American civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, Chicano Movements and sectors of organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups, including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, military veterans, and physicians such as Benjamin Spock.
Their actions consisted mainly of peaceful, nonviolent events; few events were deliberately provocative and violent. In some cases, police used violent tactics against peaceful demonstrators. By 1967, according to Gallup polls, an increasing majority of Americans considered military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake. This was echoed decades later by the then-head of American war planning, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.[1]
U.S. military involvement in Vietnam began in 1950 with the support of French Indochina against communist Chinese forces. Both military involvement and opposition escalated after the Congressional authorization of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, with U.S. ground troops first arriving in Vietnam on March 8, 1965. Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States in 1968 on the platform of ending the Vietnam War and the draft. Nixon began the drawdown of U.S. troop presence in April 1969. Protests spiked after the announcement in April 1970 of the expansion of the war into Cambodia. The Pentagon Papers were published in June 1971. The last draftees reported in late 1972 and the last U.S. combat troops withdrew from Vietnam in March 1973.
See also: United States news media and the Vietnam War. The draft, a system of conscription that mainly drew from minorities and lower- and middle-class whites, drove much of the protest after 1965. Conscientious objectors played an active role despite their small numbers. The prevailing sentiment that the draft was unfairly administered fueled student and blue-collar American opposition to the military draft.
Opposition to the war arose during a time of unprecedented student activism, which followed the free speech movement and the civil rights movement. The military draft mobilized the baby boomers, who were most at risk, but it grew to include a varied cross-section of Americans. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War was partly attributed to greater access to uncensored information through extensive television coverage on the ground in Vietnam.
Beyond opposition to the draft, anti-war protesters also made moral arguments against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, preceding the later Quaker protests but "just after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the Service Committee bought a page in The New York Times to protest what seemed to be the tendency of the USA to step into Indo-China as France stepped out. We expressed our fear that in so doing, America would back into a war."[2] The moral imperative argument against the war was especially popular among American college students, who were more likely than the general public to accuse the United States of having imperialistic goals in Vietnam and to criticize the war as "immoral."[3] Civilian deaths, which were downplayed or omitted entirely by the Western media, became a subject of protest when photographic evidence of casualties emerged. An infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shooting an alleged terrorist in handcuffs during the Tet Offensive also provoked public outcry.[4]
Another element of the American opposition to the war was the perception that U.S. justification for intervention in Vietnam (i.e. the domino theory and the threat of communism) was not legally justifiable. Some Americans believed that the communist threat was used as a scapegoat to hide imperialistic intentions. Others argued that the American intervention in South Vietnam interfered with the self-determination of the country, expressing that the war in Vietnam was a civil war that ought to have determined the fate of the country.[4]
Media coverage of the war also shook the faith of citizens at home as new television brought images of wartime conflict to viewers at home. Newsmen like NBC's Frank McGee stated that the war was all but lost as a "conclusion to be drawn inescapably from the facts."[4] For the first time in American history, the media had the means to broadcast battlefield images. Graphic footage of casualties on the nightly news eliminated any myth of the glory of war. With no clear sign of victory in Vietnam, American military casualties helped stimulate opposition to the war by Americans. In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky reject the mainstream view of how the media influenced the war and propose that the media instead censored the more brutal images of the fighting and the death of millions of innocent people.
The U.S. became polarized over the war. Many supporters of U.S. involvement argued for what was known as the domino theory, a theory that believed if one country fell to communism, then the bordering countries would be sure to fall as well, like falling dominoes. This theory was largely held due to the fall of Eastern Europe to communism and the Soviet sphere of influence following World War II. However, military critics of the war pointed out that the Vietnam War was political and that the military mission lacked any clear idea of how to achieve its objectives. Civilian critics of the war argued that the government of South Vietnam lacked political legitimacy or that support for the war was completely immoral.
The media also played a substantial role in the polarization of American opinion regarding the Vietnam War. For example, in 1965, a majority of the media attention focused on military tactics, with very little discussion about the necessity for a full-scale intervention in Southeast Asia.[5] After 1965, the media covered the dissent and domestic controversy that existed within the United States, but mostly excluded the actual view of dissidents and resisters.[5]
The media established a sphere of public discourse surrounding the Hawk versus Dove debate. The Dove was a liberal and a critic of the war. Doves claimed that the war was well-intentioned but a disastrous mistake in an otherwise benign foreign policy. It is important to note that the Doves did not question the U.S.'s intentions in intervening in Vietnam, nor did they question the morality or legality of the U.S. intervention. Instead, they made pragmatic claims that the war was a mistake. Contrarily, the Hawks argued that the war was legitimate, winnable, and part of benign U.S. foreign policy. The Hawks claimed that the one-sided criticism of the media contributed to the decline of public support for the war and ultimately helped the U.S. lose the war. Author William F. Buckley repeatedly wrote about his approval of the war and suggested, "[t]he United States has been timid, if not cowardly, in refusing to seek 'victory' in Vietnam." The Hawks claimed that the liberal media was responsible for the growing popular disenchantment with the war and blamed the Western media for losing the war in Southeast Asia as communism was no longer a threat for them.
Early organized opposition was led by American Quakers in the 1950s, and by November 1960, eleven hundred Quakers undertook a silent protest vigil. The group "ringed the Pentagon for parts of two days".[2]
Protests began bringing attention to the draft on May 5, 1965. Student activists at the University of California Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft Board and forty students staged the first public Draft-card burning in the United States. Another 19 cards were burned on May 22, 1965, at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach-in.[6] Draft card protests were primarily aimed at the immoral conduct of the war, rather than the draft itself.[7]
At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually conscripted, but the Draft Board in each locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for exemption. In late July 1965, Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted per month from 17,000 to 35,000, and on August 31, 1965, he signed the Draft Card Mutilation Act, making it a crime to knowingly destroy or mutilate a draft card.[8]
On October 15, 1965, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam in New York staged the first draft card burning, resulting in an arrest under the new law.
Gruesome images of two anti-war activists who set themselves on fire in November 1965 demonstrated how strongly some people felt that the war was immoral. On November 2, 32-year-old Quaker Norman Morrison set himself on fire in front of The Pentagon. On November 9, 22-year-old Catholic Worker Movement member Roger Allen LaPorte did the same in front of United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Both protests were conscious imitations of earlier (and ongoing) Buddhist protests in South Vietnam.
The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the U.S. government. On August 16, 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigations of Americans who were suspected of aiding the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam. They intended to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting, with 50 individuals being arrested.
In February 1967, The New York Review of Books published "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", an essay by Noam Chomsky, a leading intellectual opponent of the war. In the essay, Chomsky argued that much responsibility for the war lay with liberal intellectuals and technical experts who were providing, what he saw as, pseudoscientific justification for the policies of the U.S. Government. The Time Inc. magazines Time and Life maintained a very pro-war editorial stance until October 1967, when the editor-in-chief Hedley Donovan came out against the war.[9] Donovan wrote in an editorial in Life that the United States had gone into Vietnam for "honorable and sensible purposes", but the war had turned out to be "harder, longer, more complicated" than expected.[10] Donovan ended his editorial by writing that the war was "not worth winning", as South Vietnam was "not absolutely imperative" to maintain American interests in Asia, which made it impossible "to ask young Americans to die for".[10]
In 1967, the continued operation of a seemingly unfair draft system, then calling as many as 40,000 men for induction each month, fueled a burgeoning draft resistance movement. The draft favored white, middle-class men, which allowed an economically and racially discriminating draft to force young African American men to serve at rates that were disproportionately higher than the general population. Although in 1967 there was a smaller field of draft-eligible black men, 29 percent, versus 63 percent of white men, 64 percent of eligible black men were chosen to serve in the war through conscription, compared to only 31 percent of eligible white men.[11]
On October 16, 1967, draft card turn-ins were held across the country, yielding more than 1,000 draft cards, later returned to the Justice Department as an act of civil disobedience. Resisters expected to be prosecuted immediately, but Attorney General Ramsey Clark instead prosecuted a group of ringleaders, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr., in Boston in 1968. By the late 1960s, one-quarter of all court cases dealt with the draft, including men accused of draft-dodging and men petitioning for the status of conscientious objector. Over 210,000 men were accused of draft-related offenses, 25,000 of whom were indicted.
The charges of unfairness led to the institution of a draft lottery for the year 1970 in which a young man's birthday determined his relative risk of being drafted (September 14 was the birthday at the top of the draft list for 1970; the following year July 9 held this distinction). However, popular anti-war speculation that most American soldiers, as well as most of the American soldiers killed during the Vietnam War, were draftees was discredited in later years, as the large majority of these soldiers were, in fact, confirmed to be volunteers.[12]
On February 1, 1968, Nguyễn Văn Lém, a Viet Cong officer suspected of participating in the murder of South Vietnamese government officials during the Tet Offensive, was summarily executed by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, the South Vietnamese National Police Chief. Loan shot Lém in the head on a public street in Saigon, despite being in front of journalists. South Vietnamese reports provided as justification after the fact claimed that Lém was captured near the site of a ditch holding as many as thirty-four bound and shot bodies of police and their relatives, some of whom were the families of General Loan's deputy and close friend. The execution provided an iconic image that helped sway public opinion in the United States against the war.
The events of Tet in early 1968 as a whole also remarkably shifted public opinion regarding the war. U.S. military officials had previously reported that counterinsurgency in South Vietnam was being prosecuted successfully. While the Tet Offensive provided the U.S. and allied militaries with a great victory in that the Viet Cong was finally brought into open battle and destroyed as a fighting force, the American media, including respected figures such as Walter Cronkite, interpreted such events as the attack on the American embassy in Saigon as an indicator of U.S. military weakness.[13] The military victories on the battlefields of Tet were obscured by shocking images of violence on television screens, long casualty lists, and a new perception among the American people that the military had been untruthful to them about the success of earlier military operations, and ultimately, the ability to achieve a meaningful military solution in Vietnam.
See also: 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity and Withdrawal of Lyndon B. Johnson from the 1968 United States presidential election.
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson began his re-election campaign. Eugene McCarthy ran against him for the nomination on an anti-war platform. McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New Hampshire, but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent. The resulting blow to the Johnson campaign, combined with other factors, led the President to announce that he was pulling out of the race on March 31 in a televised speech. He also announced the initiation of the Paris Peace Negotiations with Vietnam in that speech. Then, on August 4, 1969, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy began secret peace negotiations at the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris.
After breaking with Johnson's pro-war stance, Robert F. Kennedy entered the race on March 16 and ran for the nomination on an anti-war platform. Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, also ran for the nomination, promising to continue to support the South Vietnamese government.
See main article: Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. In May 1969, Life magazine published in a single issue photographs of the faces of the roughly 250 or so American servicemen who had been killed in Vietnam during a "routine week" of war in the spring of 1969.[10] Contrary to expectations, the issue sold out, with many being haunted by the photographs of the ordinary young Americans killed.[10] On October 15, 1969, hundreds of thousands of people took part in National Moratorium anti-war demonstrations across the United States; the demonstrations prompted many workers to call in sick from their jobs and adolescents nationwide engaged in truancy from school. About 15 million Americans took part in the demonstration of October 15, making it the largest protest in a single day up to that point.[14] A second round of "Moratorium" demonstrations was held on November 15 and attracted more people than the first.[15] Over half a million people rallied in Washington, D.C., while about 250,000 rallied that day in San Francisco. The Washington demonstration was preceded by the "March against Death" on November 13 and 14.
See main article: Hearts and Minds (Vietnam War). The U.S. realized that the South Vietnamese government needed a solid base of popular support if it were to survive the insurgency. To pursue this goal of winning the "Hearts and Minds" of the Vietnamese people, units of the United States Army, referred to as "Civil Affairs" units, were used extensively for the first time since World War II.
Civil Affairs units, while remaining armed and under direct military control, engaged in what came to be known as "nation-building": constructing (or reconstructing) schools, public buildings, roads, and other infrastructure; conducting medical programs for civilians who had no access to medical facilities; facilitating cooperation among local civilian leaders; conducting hygiene and other training for civilians; and similar activities.
This policy of attempting to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, however, often was at odds with other aspects of the war, which sometimes served to antagonize many Vietnamese civilians and provided ammunition to the anti-war movement. These included the emphasis on "body count" as a way of measuring military success on the battlefield, civilian casualties during the bombing of villages (symbolized by journalist Peter Arnett's famous quote, "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it"), and the killing of civilians in such incidents as the My Lai massacre. In 1974, the documentary Hearts and Minds sought to portray the devastation the war was causing to the South Vietnamese people and won an Academy Award for best documentary amid considerable controversy. The South Vietnamese government also antagonized many of its citizens with its suppression of political opposition through such measures as holding large numbers of political prisoners, torturing political opponents, and holding a one-man election for President in 1971. Covert counter-terror programs and semi-covert ones such as the Phoenix Program attempted, with the help of anthropologists, to isolate rural South Vietnamese villages and affect the loyalty of the residents.
Despite the increasingly depressing news of the war, many Americans continued to support President Johnson's endeavors. Aside from the domino theory mentioned above, there was a feeling that the goal of preventing a communist takeover of a pro-Western government in South Vietnam was a noble objective. Many Americans were also concerned about saving face in the event of disengaging from the war or, as President Richard M. Nixon later put it, "achieving Peace with Honor." In addition, instances of Viet Cong atrocities were widely reported, most notably in an article that appeared in Reader's Digest in 1968 entitled The Blood-Red Hands of Ho Chi Minh.
However, anti-war feelings also began to rise. Many Americans opposed the war on moral grounds, appalled by the devastation and violence of the war. Others claimed the conflict was a war against Vietnamese independence or an intervention in a foreign civil war; others opposed it because they felt it lacked clear objectives and appeared to be unwinnable. Many anti-war activists themselves were Vietnam veterans, as evidenced by the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
In April 1971, thousands of these veterans converged on the White House in Washington, D.C., and hundreds threw their medals and decorations on the steps of the United States Capitol. By this time, it had also become commonplace for the most radical anti-war demonstrators to prominently display the flag of the Viet Cong "enemy," an act which alienated many who were otherwise morally opposed to the war.
As the Vietnam War continued to escalate, public disenchantment grew, and a variety of different groups were formed or became involved in the movement.
See also: Black Power movement. African-American leaders of earlier decades, like W. E. B. Du Bois, were often anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist. Paul Robeson weighed in on the Vietnamese struggle in 1954, calling Ho Chi Minh "the modern day Toussaint L'Overture, leading his people to freedom." These figures were driven from public life by McCarthyism, however, and black leaders were more cautious about criticizing U.S. foreign policy as the 1960s began.[16]
By the middle of the decade, open condemnation of the war became more common, with figures like Malcolm X and Bob Moses speaking out.[17] Champion boxer Muhammad Ali risked his career and a prison sentence to resist the draft in 1966. Soon, Martin Luther King Jr., Coretta Scott King, and James Bevel of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) became prominent opponents of the Vietnam War, and Bevel became the director of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The Black Panther Party vehemently opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At the beginning of the war, some African Americans did not want to join the war opposition movement because of loyalty to President Johnson for pushing Civil Rights legislation, but soon the escalating violence of the war and the perceived social injustice of the draft propelled involvement in antiwar groups.
In March 1965, King first criticized the war during the Selma march when he told a journalist that "millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Vietnam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma".[18] In 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) became the first major civil rights group to issue a formal statement against the war. When SNCC-backed Georgia Representative Julian Bond acknowledged his agreement with the anti-war statement, he was refused his seat by the State of Georgia, an injustice which he successfully appealed up to the Supreme Court.[19] SNCC had special significance as a nexus between the student movement and the black movement. At an SDS-organized conference at UC Berkeley in October 1966, SNCC Chair Stokely Carmichael challenged the white left to escalate their resistance to the military draft in a manner similar to the black movement. Some participants in ghetto rebellions of the era had already associated their actions with opposition to the Vietnam War, and SNCC first disrupted an Atlanta draft board in August 1966. According to historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin, SDS's first Stop the Draft Week of October 1967 was "inspired by Black Power [and] emboldened by the ghetto rebellions." SNCC appears to have originated the popular anti-draft slogan: "Hell no! We won't go!"[20]
On April 4, 1967, King gave a much-publicized speech entitled "" at the Riverside Church in New York, attacking President Johnson for "deadly Western arrogance," declaring that "we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor".[18] King's speech attracted much controversy at the time, with many feeling that it was ungrateful for him to attack the president who done the most for civil rights for African Americans since Abraham Lincoln had abolished slavery a century before. Liberal newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times condemned King for his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, while the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People disallowed him.[21] The "Beyond Vietnam" speech involved King in a debate with the diplomat Ralph Bunche who argued that it was folly to associate the civil rights movement with the anti-Vietnam war movement, maintaining that this would set back civil rights for African Americans.[21] This speech also showed how bold King could be when he condemned U.S. "aggression" in Vietnam; and this is considered a milestone in King's critiques against imperialism and militarism.[22]
King, during the year of 1966, spoke out that it was hypocritical for Black Americans to be fighting in Vietnam, since they were being treated as second-class citizens back home.[22] One of his arguments was that many white middle-class men avoided the draft by college deferments, but his greatest defense was that the arms race and the Vietnam War were taking much needed resources away from the civil rights movement and the War on Poverty.[23] To combat these issues, King selected a strategy of rallying the poor working-class in hopes that the Federal Government would redirect resources toward fighting the War on Poverty.[24] King used the statistic that the U.S. government underestimated the cost of the 1967 war budget by $10 billion, which was five times the poverty budget.[25]
Black antiwar groups opposed the war for similar reasons as white groups, but often protested in separate events and sometimes did not cooperate with the ideas of white antiwar leadership. They harshly criticized the draft because poor and minority men were usually most affected by conscription. In 1965 and 1966, African Americans accounted for 25 percent of combat deaths, more than twice their proportion of the population. As a result, black enlisted men protested and began the resistance movement among veterans. After taking measures to reduce the fatalities, apparently in response to widespread protest, the military brought the proportion of blacks down to 12.6 percent of casualties.[26]
African Americans involved in the antiwar movement often formed their own groups, such as Black Women Enraged, National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union, and National Black Draft Counselors. Some differences in these groups included how Black Americans rallied behind the banner of "Self-determination for Black America and Vietnam," while whites marched under banners that said, "Support Our GIs, Bring Them Home Now!".[27] Within these groups, however, many African American women were seen as subordinate members by black male leaders. Many African American women viewed the war in Vietnam as racially motivated and sympathized strongly with Vietnamese women. Such concerns often propelled their participation in the antiwar movement and their creation of new opposition groups.
Many artists during the 1960s and 1970s opposed the war and used their creativity and careers to oppose the war visibly. Writers and poets who were opposed to involvement in the war included Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and Robert Bly. Artists often incorporated imagery based on the tragic events of the war as well as the disparity between life in Vietnam and life in the United States. Visual artists such as Ronald Haeberle, Peter Saul, Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, among many others, created antiwar works. According to art historian Matthew Israel's book Kill for Peace: American Artists Against the Vietnam War, "significant examples of this politically engaged production...encompassed painting, sculpture, performance, installation, posters, short films, and comics—and...ranged from the most 'representational' to the most 'abstract' forms of expression."[28]
Filmmakers such as Lenny Lipton, Jerry Abrams, Peter Gessner, and David Ringo created documentary-style movies featuring footage from the antiwar marches to raise awareness about the war and the diverse opposition movement. Playwrights like Frank O'Hara, Sam Shepard, Robert Lowell, Megan Terry, Grant Duay, and Kenneth Bernard used theater as a vehicle for portraying their thoughts about the Vietnam War, often satirizing the role of America in the world and juxtaposing the horrific effects of war with normal scenes of life. Regardless of medium, antiwar artists ranged from pacifists to violent radicals and caused Americans to think more critically about the war. Art as war opposition was quite popular in the early years of the war, but soon faded as political activism became the more common and most visible way of opposing the war.[29]
See also: Asian American movement.
Many Asian-Americans were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. They saw the war as being a significant action of U.S. imperialism and "connected the oppression of the Asians in the United States to the prosecution of the war in Vietnam."[30] Unlike many Americans in the anti-war movement, they viewed the war "not just as imperialist but specifically as anti-Asian."[31] Groups like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), the Bay Area Coalition Against the War (BAACAW), and the Asian Americans for Action (AAA) made opposition to the war their main focus.
Of these organizations, the Bay Area Coalition Against the War was the biggest and most significant. BAACAW was "highly organized, holding biweekly ninety-minute meetings of the Coordinating Committee at which each regional would submit detailed reports and action plans."[32] The driving force behind its formation was anger at "the bombing of Hanoi and the mining of Haiphong Harbor." The organization supported the Japanese Community Youth Center, members of the Asian Community Center, student leaders of Asian American student unions and others.[33]
The BAACAW members consisted of many Asian-Americans, and they were involved in antiwar efforts like marches, study groups, fundraisers, teach-ins and demonstrations. During marches, Asian American activists carried banners that read "Stop the Bombing of Asian People and Stop Killing Our Asian Brothers and Sisters."[34] Its newsletter stated, "our goal is to build a solid, broad-based anti-imperialist movement of Asian people against the war in Vietnam."[35]
The anti-war sentiment of Asian Americans was fueled by the racial inequality that they faced in the United States. As historian Daryl Maeda notes, "the antiwar movement articulated Asian Americans' racial commonality with Vietnamese people in two distinctly gendered ways: identification based on the experiences of male soldiers and identification by women."[36] Asian American soldiers in the U.S. military were many times classified as being like the enemy. They were referred to as gooks and had a racialized identity in comparison to their non-Asian counterparts. There was also the hypersexualization of Vietnamese women, which in turn affected how Asian American women in the military were treated. "In a Gidra article, [a prominent influential newspaper of the Asian American movement], Evelyn Yoshimura noted that the U.S. military systematically portrayed Vietnamese women as prostitutes as a way of dehumanizing them."[37]
Asian American groups realized that to extinguish racism, they also had to address sexism as well. This, in turn, led to women's leadership in the Asian American antiwar movement. Patsy Chan, a "Third World" activist, said at an antiwar rally in San Francisco, "We, as Third World women [express] our militant solidarity with our brothers and sisters from Indochina. We, as Third World people know of the struggle the Indochinese are waging against imperialism, because we share that common enemy in the United States."[38] Some other notable figures were Grace Lee Boggs and Yuri Kochiyama. Both Boggs and Kochiyama were inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and "a growing number of Asian Americans began to push forward a new era in radical Asian American politics."[39]
Many Asian-Americans spoke against the war because of the way that the Vietnamese were referred within the U.S. military by the disparaging term "gook", and more generally because they encountered bigotry because they looked like "the enemy".[40] One Japanese-American veteran, Norman Nakamura, wrote in an article in the June/July issue of Gidra, that during his tour of duty in Vietnam of 1969-70 that there was an atmosphere of systematic racism towards all Vietnamese people, who were seen as less than human, being merely "gooks".[40] Because most white Americans did not make much effort to distinguish between Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Korean-Americans, and Filipino-Americans, the anti-Asian racism generated by the war led to the emergence of a pan-Asian American identity.[40]
Another Japanese-American veteran, Mike Nakayama, reported to Gidra in 1971 that he was wounded in Vietnam. He was initially refused medical treatment because he was seen as a "gook" with the doctors thinking that he was a South Vietnamese soldier (who were clothed in American uniforms). Only when he established that he spoke English as his first language was he recognized as an American.[40] In May 1972, Gidra ran on its cover a cartoon of a female Viet Cong guerrilla being faced with an Asian-American soldier who is commanded by his white officer to "Kill that gook, you gook!".[40]
There were also Asian American musicians who traveled around the United States to oppose the imperialist actions of the American government, specifically their involvement in Vietnam. "The folk trio 'A Grain of Sand' ... [consisting of the members] JoAnne 'Nobuko' Miyamoto, Chris Iijima, and William 'Charlie' Chin, performed across the nation as traveling troubadours who set the antiracist politics of the Asian American movement to music."[38] This band was so against the imperialistic actions of the United States, that they supported the Vietnamese people vocally through their song 'War of the Flea'.[38] Asian American poets and playwrights also joined in unity with the movement's antiwar sentiments. Melvyn Escueta created the play 'Honey Bucket' and was an Asian American war veteran. Through this play, "Escueta establishes equivalencies between his protagonist, a Filipino American soldier named Andy, and the Vietnamese people."[38]
"The Asian American antiwar movement emerged from a belief that the mainstream peace movement was racist in its disregard to Asians ... Steve Louie remembers that while the white antiwar movement had 'this moral thing about no killing,' Asian Americans sought to bring attention to 'a bigger issue ... genocide.' ... the broader movement had a hard time with the Asian movement ... because it broadened the issues out beyond where they wanted to go ... the whole question of U.S. imperialism as a system, at home and abroad."[41]
The clergy, often a forgotten group during the opposition to the Vietnam War, played a large role as well. The clergy covered any of the religious leaders and members, including individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr. In his speech "Beyond Vietnam," King stated, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."[42] King was not looking for racial equality through this speech but tried to voice for an end to the war instead.
The involvement of the clergy did not stop at King. The analysis entitled "Social Movement Participation: Clergy and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement" expands upon the anti-war movement by taking King, a single religious figurehead, and explaining the movement from the entire clergy's perspective. The clergy were often forgotten though throughout this opposition. The analysis refers to that fact by saying, "The research concerning clergy anti-war participation is even more barren than the literature on student activism."[43] There is a relationship and correlation between theology and political opinions, and during the Vietnam War, the same relationship occurred between feelings about the war and theology.[43] This article was a social experiment finding results on how the pastors and clergy members reacted to the war. Based on the results found, the clergy did not believe in the war and wished to help end it.
Another source, Lift Up Your Voice Like A Trumpet: White Clergy And The Civil Rights And Antiwar Movements, 1954–1973 explains the story of the entire spectrum of the clergy and their involvement. Michael Freidland is able to tell the story completely in his chapter entitled, "A Voice of Moderation: Clergy and the Anti-War Movement: 1966–1967". In basic summary, each specific clergy from each religion had their own view of the war and how they dealt with it, but as a whole, the clergy was completely against the war.[44]
See main article: Draft evasion in the Vietnam War.
See also: Draft-card burning, Vietnam War resisters in Canada and Vietnam War resisters in Sweden.
The first draft lottery since World War II in the United States was held on December 1, 1969, and was met with large protests and a great deal of controversy; statistical analysis indicated that the methodology of the lotteries unintentionally disadvantaged men with late year birthdays.[45] This issue was treated at length in a January 4, 1970 New York Times article titled "Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random" .
Various antiwar groups, such as Another Mother for Peace, WILPF, and WSP, had free draft counseling centers, where they gave young American men advice for legally and illegally evading the draft.
Over 30,000 people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft. The Japanese anti-war group Beheiren helped some American soldiers to desert and hide from the military in Japan.[46]
To gain an exemption or deferment, many men attended college, though they had to remain in college until their 26th birthday to be certain of avoiding the draft. Some men were rejected by the military as 4-F unfit for service failing to meet physical, mental, or moral standards. Still others joined the National Guard or entered the Peace Corps as a way of avoiding Vietnam. All of these issues raised concerns about the fairness of who got selected for involuntary service, since it was often the poor or those without connections who were drafted. Ironically, in light of modern political issues, a certain exemption was a convincing claim of homosexuality, but very few men attempted this because of the stigma involved. Also, conviction for certain crimes earned an exclusion, the topic of the anti-war song "Alice's Restaurant" by Arlo Guthrie.
Even many of those who never received a deferment or exemption never served, simply because the pool of eligible men was so huge compared to the number required for service, that the draft boards never got around to drafting them when a new crop of men became available (until 1969) or because they had high lottery numbers (1970 and later).
Of those soldiers who served during the war, there was increasing opposition to the conflict amongst GIs,[47] which resulted in fragging and many other activities which hampered the US's ability to wage war effectively.
Most of those subjected to the draft were too young to vote or drink in most states, and the image of young people being forced to risk their lives in the military without the privileges of enfranchisement or the ability to drink alcohol legally also successfully pressured legislators to lower the voting age nationally and the drinking age in many states.
Student opposition groups on many college and university campuses seized campus administration offices, and in several instances forced the expulsion of ROTC programs from the campus.
Some Americans who were not subject to the draft protested the conscription of their tax dollars for the war effort. War tax resistance, once mostly isolated to solitary anarchists like Henry David Thoreau and religious pacifists like the Quakers, became a more mainstream protest tactic. As of 1972, an estimated 200,000–500,000 people were refusing to pay the excise taxes on their telephone bills, and another 20,000 were resisting part or all of their income tax bills. Among the tax resisters were Joan Baez and Noam Chomsky.[48]
Momentum from the protest organizations and the war's impact on the environment became focal point of issues to an overwhelmingly main force for the growth of an environmental movement in the United States. Many of the environment-oriented demonstrations were inspired by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, which warned of the harmful effects of pesticide use on the earth.[49] For demonstrators, Carson's warnings paralleled with the United States' use of chemicals in Vietnam such as Agent Orange, a chemical compound which was used to clear forestry being used as cover, initially conducted by the United States Air Force in Operation Ranch Hand in 1962.[50]
Protest to American participation in the Vietnam War was a movement that many popular musicians shared in, which was a stark contrast to the pro-war compositions of artists during World War II.[51] These musicians included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Lou Harrison, Gail Kubik, William Mayer, Elie Siegmeister, Robert Fink, David Noon, Richard Wernick, and John W. Downey.[52] However, of over 5,000 Vietnam War-related songs identified to date, many took a patriotic, pro-government, or pro-soldier perspective.[53] The two most notable genres involved in this protest were Rock and Roll and Folk music. While composers created pieces affronting the war, they were not limited to their music. Often protesters were being arrested and participating in peace marches and popular musicians were among their ranks.[54] This concept of intimate involvement reached new heights in May 1968 when the "Composers and Musicians for Peace" concert was staged in New York. As the war continued, and with the new media coverage, the movement snowballed, and popular music reflected this. As early as the summer of 1965, music-based protest against the American involvement in Southeast Asia began with works like P. F. Sloan's folk rock song Eve of Destruction, recorded by Barry McGuire as one of the earliest musical protests against the Vietnam War.[55]
A key figure on the rock end of the antiwar spectrum was Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970). Hendrix had a huge following among the youth culture exploring itself through drugs and experiencing itself through rock music. He was not an official protester of the war; one of Hendrix's biographers contends that Hendrix, being a former soldier, sympathized with the anticommunist view.[56] He did, however, protest the violence that took place in the Vietnam War. With the song "Machine Gun", dedicated to those fighting in Vietnam, this protest of violence is manifest. David Henderson, author of Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, describes the song as "scary funk ... his sound over the drone shifts from a woman's scream, to a siren, to a fighter plane diving, all amid Buddy Miles' Gatling-gun snare shots. ... he says 'evil man make me kill you ... make you kill me although we're only families apart.'"[57] This song was often accompanied with pleas from Hendrix to bring the soldiers back home and cease the bloodshed.[58] While Hendrix's views may not have been analogous to the protesters, his songs became anthems to the antiwar movement. Songs such as "Star Spangled Banner" showed individuals that "you can love your country, but hate the government."[59] Hendrix's anti-violence efforts are summed up in his words: "when the power of love overcomes the love of power ... the world will know peace." Thus, Hendrix's personal views did not coincide perfectly with those of the antiwar protesters; however, his anti-violence outlook was a driving force during the years of the Vietnam War even after his death (1970).
The song known to many as the anthem of the protest movement was The "Fish" Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Ragfirst released on an EP in the October 1965 issue of Rag Babyby Country Joe and the Fish,[60] one of the most successful protest bands. Although this song was not on music charts probably because it was too radical, it was performed at many public events including the famous Woodstock music festival (1969). "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag" was a song that used sarcasm to communicate the problems with not only the war but also the public's naïve attitudes towards it. It was said that "the happy beat and insouciance of the vocalist are in odd juxtaposition to the lyrics that reinforce the sad fact that the American public was being forced into realizing that Vietnam was no longer a remote place on the other side of the world, and the damage it was doing to the country could no longer be considered collateral, involving someone else."[61]
Along with singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, who attended and organized anti-war events and wrote such songs as "I Ain't Marching Any More" and "The War Is Over", another key historical figure of the antiwar movement was Bob Dylan. Folk and Rock were critical aspects of counterculture during the Vietnam War[62] both were genres that Dylan would dabble in. His success in writing protest songs came from his pre-existing popularity, as he did not initially intend on doing so. Todd Gitlin, a leader of a student movement at the time, was quoted in saying "Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us. ... We followed his career as if he were singing our songs."[63] The anthem "Blowin' in the Wind" embodied Dylan's anti-war, pro-civil rights sentiment. To complement "Blowin' in the Wind" Dylan's song "The Times they are A-Changin'" alludes to a new method of governing that is necessary and warns those who currently participate in government that the change is imminent. Dylan tells the "senators and congressmen [to] please heed the call." Dylan's songs were designed to awaken the public and to cause a reaction. The protesters of the Vietnam War identified their cause so closely with the artistic compositions of Dylan that Joan Baez and Judy Collins performed "The Times they are A-Changin'" at a march protesting the Vietnam War (1965) and also for President Johnson.[63] While Dylan renounced the idea of subscribing to the ideals of one individual, his feelings of protest towards Vietnam were appropriated by the general movement and they "awaited his gnomic yet oracular pronouncements", which provided a guiding aspect to the movement as a whole.[64]
John Lennon, former member of the Beatles, did most of his activism in his solo career with wife Yoko Ono. Given his immense fame due to the success of the Beatles, he was a very prominent movement figure with the constant media and press attention. Still being proactive on their honeymoon, the newlyweds controversially held a sit-in, where they sat in bed for a week answering press questions. They held numerous sit-ins, one where they first introduced their song "Give Peace a Chance". Lennon and Ono's song overshadowed many previous held anthems, as it became known as the ultimate anthem of peace in the 1970s, with their words "all we are saying ... is give peace a chance" being sung globally.[65]
See main article: G.I. movement and GI Underground Press. Within the United States military various servicemembers would organize to avoid military duties and individual actors would also carry out their own acts of resistance. The movement consisted of the self-organizing of active duty members and veterans in collaboration with civilian peace activists. By 1971 the United States military would become so demoralized that the military would have severe difficulties properly waging war.[66] [67]
There was a great deal of civic unrest on college campuses throughout the 1960s as students became increasingly involved in the Civil Rights Movement, Second Wave Feminism, and anti-war movement. Doug McAdam explains the success of the mass mobilization of volunteers for Freedom Summer in terms of "Biographical Availability", where individuals must have a certain degree of social, economic, and psychological freedom to be able to participate in large scale social movements.[68] This explanation can also be applied to the Anti-War Movement because it occurred around the same time and the same biographical factors applied to the college-aged anti-war protesters. David Meyers (2007) also explains how the concept of personal efficacy affects mass movement mobilization. For example, according to Meyers' thesis, consider that American wealth increased drastically after World War II. At this time, America was a superpower and enjoyed great affluence after thirty years of depression, war, and sacrifice. Benjamin T. Harrison (2000) argues that the post World War II affluence set the stage for the protest generation in the 1960s.[69] His central thesis is that the World Wars and Great Depression spawned a 'beat generation' refusing to conform to mainstream American values which lead to the emergence of the Hippies and the counterculture.
The Anti-war movement became part of a larger protest movement against the traditional American Values and attitudes. Meyers (2007) builds off this claim in his argument that the "relatively privileged enjoy the education and affirmation that afford them the belief that they might make a difference."[70] As a result of the present factors in terms of affluence, biographical availability (defined in the sociological areas of activism as the lack of restrictions on social relationships of which most likely increases the consequences of participating in a social movement), and increasing political atmosphere across the county, political activity increased drastically on college campuses. In one instance, John William Ward, then president of Amherst College, sat down in front of Westover Air Force Base near Chicopee, Massachusetts, along with 1000 students, some faculty, and his wife Barbara to protest against Richard Nixon's escalation of offensive bombing in Southeast Asia.[71]
College enrollment reached 9 million by the end of the 1960s. Colleges and universities in America had more students than ever before, and these institutions often tried to restrict student behavior to maintain order on the campuses. To combat this, many college students became active in causes that promoted free speech, student input in the curriculum, and an end to archaic social restrictions. Students joined the antiwar movement because they did not want to fight in a foreign civil war that they believed did not concern them or because they were morally opposed to all war. Others disliked the war because it diverted funds and attention away from problems in the U.S. Intellectual growth and gaining a liberal perspective at college caused many students to become active in the antiwar movement.
Another attractive feature of the opposition movement was the fact that it was a popular social event. Most student antiwar organizations were locally or campus-based, including chapters of the very loosely coordinated Students for a Democratic Society, because they were easier to organize and participate in than national groups. Common antiwar demonstrations for college students featured attempts to sever ties between the war machine and universities through burning draft cards, protesting universities furnishing grades to draft boards, and protesting military and Dow Chemical job fairs on campus.[72] [73] From 1969 to 1970, student protesters attacked 197 ROTC buildings on college campuses. Protests grew after the Kent State shootings, radicalizing more and more students. Although the media often portrayed the student antiwar movement as aggressive and widespread, only 10% of the 2500 colleges in the United States had violent protests throughout the Vietnam War years. By the early 1970s, most student protest movements died down due to President Nixon's de-escalation of the war, the economic downturn, and disillusionment with the powerlessness of the antiwar movement.
See also: Women's liberation movement. Women were a large part of the antiwar movement, even though they were sometimes relegated to second-class status within the organizations or faced sexism within opposition groups.[74] Some leaders of anti-war groups viewed women as sex objects or secretaries, not actual thinkers who could contribute positively and tangibly to the group's goals, or believed that women could not truly understand and join the antiwar movement because they were unaffected by the draft. Women involved in opposition groups disliked the romanticism of the violence of both the war and the antiwar movement that was common amongst male war protesters.[75] Despite the inequalities, participation in various antiwar groups allowed women to gain experience with organizing protests and crafting effective antiwar rhetoric. These newfound skills combined with their dislike of sexism within the opposition movement caused many women to break away from the mainstream antiwar movement and create or join women's antiwar groups, such as Another Mother for Peace, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Women Strike for Peace (WSP), also known as Women For Peace. Female soldiers serving in Vietnam joined the movement to battle the war and sexism, racism, and the established military bureaucracy by writing articles for antiwar and antimilitary newspapers.[76]
Mothers and older generations of women joined the opposition movement, as advocates for peace and people opposed to the effects of the war and the draft on the generation of young men. These women saw the draft as one of the most disliked parts of the war machine and sought to undermine the war itself through undermining the draft. Another Mother for Peace and WSP often held free draft counseling centers to give young men legal and illegal methods to oppose the draft. Members of Women For Peace showed up at the White House every Sunday for 8 years from 11 to 1 for a peace vigil. Such female antiwar groups often relied on maternalism, the image of women as peaceful caretakers of the world, to express and accomplish their goals. The government often saw middle-aged women involved in such organizations as the most dangerous members of the opposition movement because they were ordinary citizens who quickly and efficiently mobilized.
Many black mothers also joined and headed organisations such as the National Welfare Rights Organisation (NWRO).[77] The NWRO, set up in 1967, critiqued the government spending budget for the Vietnam War instead of providing families domestically, decried the sending of poor men and their sons to fight in the Vietnam War, linked capitalism and the prioritization of corporations and military spending over human needs, invoked the image of the mother, and highlighted the impact of poverty and military participation on women, particularly black mothers.[78] As well as this, they critiqued the conflict for harming impoverished women, forcing them to supply labour and troops while raising children without proper pay.[79]
In 1971, the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) expanded the NWRO's reach by including black, Puerto Rican, Chicana, Asian, and Indigenous women.[80] The TWWA, organized against the Vietnam War from an internationalist and anti-imperialist perspective, inked the cost of U.S. wars abroad to the exploitation of poor communities of colour domestically, highlighted how the draft disproportionately impacted minoritized families by taking sons and leaving women behind, supported oppressed peoples rising up against their oppressors, and took inspiration from Vietnamese women fighters.
Both the NWRO and TWWA actively connected opposition to the Vietnam War to broader critiques of economic injustice and militarism, emphasizing their profound impact on women and families. These groups pioneered expansive and inclusive anti-war activism, focusing on the specific challenges faced by women of color.
Many women in America sympathized with the Vietnamese civilians affected by the war and joined the opposition movement. They protested the use of napalm, a highly flammable jelly weapon created by the Dow Chemical Company and used as a weapon during the war, by boycotting Saran Wrap, another product made by the company.
Faced with the sexism sometimes found in the antiwar movement, New Left, and Civil Rights Movement, some women created their own organizations to establish true equality of the sexes. Some of frustrations of younger women became apparent during the antiwar movement: they desired more radical change and decreased acceptance of societal gender roles than older women activists. Female activists' disillusion with the antiwar movement led to the formation of the Women's Liberation Movement to establish true equality for American women in all facets of life.
See also: List of Congressional opponents of the Vietnam War.
In October 1967 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on resolutions urging President Johnson to request an emergency session of the United Nations security council to consider proposals for ending the war.[81]
In January 1971, just weeks into his first term, Congressman Ron Dellums set up a Vietnam war crimes exhibit in an annex to his Congressional office. The exhibit featured four large posters depicting atrocities committed by American soldiers embellished with red paint. This was followed shortly thereafter by four days of hearings on "war crimes" in Vietnam, which began April 25. Dellums, assisted by the Citizens Commission of Inquiry, had called for formal investigations into the allegations, but Congress chose not to endorse these proceedings. As such, the hearings were ad hoc and only informational in nature. As a condition of room use, press and camera presence were not permitted, but the proceedings were transcribed.
In addition to Ron Dellums (Dem-CA), an additional 19 Congressional representatives took part in the hearings, including: Bella Abzug (Dem-NY), Shirley Chisholm (Dem-NY), Patsy Mink (Dem-HI), Parren Mitchell (Dem-MD), John Conyers (Dem-MI), Herman Badillo (Dem-NY), James Abourezk (Dem-SD), Leo Ryan (Dem-CA), Phil Burton (Dem-CA), Don Edwards (Dem-CA), Pete McCloskey (Rep-CA), Ed Koch (Dem-NY), John Seiberling (Dem-OH), Henry Reuss (Dem-WI), Benjamin Stanley Rosenthal (Dem-NY), Robert Kastenmeier (Dem-WI), and Abner J. Mikva (Dem-IL).[82]
The transcripts describe alleged details of U.S. military's conduct in Vietnam. Some tactics were described as "gruesome", such as the severing of ears from corpses to verify body count. Others involved the killing of civilians. Soldiers claimed to have ordered artillery strikes on villages which did not appear to have any military presence. Soldiers were claimed to use racist terms such as "gooks", "dinks" and "slant eyes" when referring to the Vietnamese.
Witnesses described that legal, by-the-book instruction was augmented by more questionable training by non-commissioned officers as to how soldiers should conduct themselves. One witness testified about "free-fire zones", areas as large as 80sqmi in which soldiers were free to shoot any Vietnamese they encountered after curfew without first making sure they were hostile. Allegations of exaggeration of body count, torture, murder and general abuse of civilians and the psychology and motivations of soldiers and officers were discussed at length.
See main article: Fulbright Hearing.
In April and May 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator J. William Fulbright, held a series of 22 hearings (referred to as the Fulbright Hearings) on proposals relating to ending the war. On the third day of the hearings, April 22, 1971, future Senator and 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry became the first Vietnam veteran to testify before Congress in opposition to the war. Speaking on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he argued for the immediate, unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam. During nearly two hours of discussions with committee members, Kerry related in some detail the findings of the Winter Soldier Investigation, in which veterans had described personally committing or witnessing atrocities and war crimes.
The American public's support of the Vietnam War decreased as the war continued on. As public support decreased, opposition grew.[83]
The Gallup News Service began asking the American public whether it was a "mistake to send troops to Vietnam" in August 1965. At the time less than a quarter of Americans polled, 24%, believed it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam while 60% of Americans polled believed the opposite. Three years later, in September 1968, 54% of Americans polled believed it was a mistake to send troops to Vietnam while 37% believed it was not a mistake.[84]
A 1965 Gallup Poll asked the question, "Have you ever felt the urge to organize or join a public demonstration about something?"[85] Positive responses were quite low; not many people wanted to protest anything, and those who did want to show a public demonstration often wanted to demonstrate in support of the Vietnam War. However, when the American Public was asked in 1990, "Looking back, do you wish that you had made a stronger effort to protest or demonstrate against the Vietnam War, or not", 25 percent said they wished they had.
| Urge to Organize or Demonstrate | Yes % | No % | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| U.S. adults | 10 | 90 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 21 to 29 years old | 15 | 85 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 30 to 49 years | 12 | 88 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 50 and older | 6 | 94 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| College graduates | 21 | 79 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| High school graduates | 9 | 91 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| High school nongraduates | 5 | 95 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Gallup, Oct. 29 – Nov. 2, 1965 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
As the war continued, the public became much more opposed to the war, seeing that it was not ending. In a poll from December 1967, 71% of the public believed the war would not be settled in 1968.[87] A year later the same question was asked and 55% of people did not think the war would be settled in 1969.[88]
When the American public was asked about the Vietnam-era Anti-War movement in the 1990s, 39% of the public said they approved, while 39% said they disapproved. The last 22% were unsure.[89]
See also: Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth. The opposition to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War had many effects, which arguably led to the eventual end of the involvement of the United States. Howard Zinn, a controversial historian, states in his book A People's History of the United States that, "in the course of the war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical role in bringing the war to an end."[90]
An alternative point of view is expressed by Michael Lind. Citing public polling data on protests during the war he claimed that: "The American public turned against the Vietnam War not because it was persuaded by the radical and liberal left that it was unjust, but out of sensitivity to its rising costs."[91]
The first effect the opposition had that led to the end of the war was that fewer soldiers were available for the army. The draft was protested and even ROTC programs too. Howard Zinn first provides a note written by a student of Boston University on May 1, 1968, which stated to his draft board, "I have absolutely no intention to report for that exam, or for induction, or to aid in any way the American war effort against the people of Vietnam ..."[92] The opposition to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War had many effects, which led to the eventual end of the involvement of the United States.[93] This refusal letter soon led to an overflow of refusals ultimately leading to the event provided by Zinn stating, "In May 1969 the Oakland induction center, where draftees reported from all of Northern California, reported that of 4,400 men ordered to report for induction, 2,400 did not show up. In the first quarter of 1970 the Selective Service System, for the first time, could not meet its quota."[93]
The fewer numbers of soldiers as an effect of the opposition to the war also can be traced to the protests against the ROTC programs in colleges. Zinn argues this by stating, "Student protests against the ROTC resulted in the canceling of those programs in over forty colleges and universities. In 1966, 191,749 college students enrolled in ROTC. By 1973, the number was 72,459."[94] The number of ROTC students in college drastically dropped and the program lost any momentum it once had before the anti-war movement.
A further effect of the opposition was that many college campuses were completely shut down due to protests. These protests led to wear on the government who tried to mitigate the tumultuous behavior and return the colleges back to normal. The colleges involved in the anti-war movement included ones such as, Brown University, Kent State University, and the University of Massachusetts.[92] Even at The College of William and Mary unrest occurred with protests by the students and even some faculty members that resulted in "multiple informants" hired to report to the CIA on the activities of students and faculty members.[95]
At the University of Massachusetts, "The 100th Commencement of the University of Massachusetts yesterday was a protest, a call for peace", "Red fists of protest, white peace symbols, and blue doves were stenciled on black academic gowns, and nearly every other senior wore an armband representing a plea for peace."[96] Additionally, "At Boston College, a Catholic institution, six thousand people gathered that evening in the gymnasium to denounce the war."[97] At Kent State University, "on May 4, when students gathered to demonstrate against the war, National Guardsmen fired into the crowd. Four students were killed."[98] Four days later, on May 8, ten (some sources say eleven) people present at a demonstration that was a response to both the war in Vietnam and the Kent State massacre were bayonetted by National Guardsmen at the University of New Mexico. 131 were arrested.[99] Finally, "At the Brown University commencement in 1969, two-thirds of the graduating class turned their backs when Henry Kissinger stood up to address them."[98] Basically, from all of the evidence here provided by the historians, Zinn and McCarthy, the second effect was very prevalent and it was the uproar at many colleges and universities as an effect of the opposition to the United States' involvement in Vietnam.
Another effect the opposition to the war had was that the American soldiers in Vietnam began to side with the opposition and feel remorse for what they were doing. Zinn argues this with an example in which the soldiers in a POW camp formed a peace committee as they wondered who the enemy of the war was, because it certainly was not known among them.[100] The statement of one of the soldiers reads:
Until we got to the first camp, we didn't see a village intact; they were all destroyed. I sat down and put myself in the middle and asked myself: Is this right or wrong? Is it right to destroy villages? Is it right to kill people en masse? After a while it just got to me.[101]
Howard Zinn provides that piece of evidence to reiterate how all of this destruction and fighting against an enemy that seems to be unknown has been taking a toll on the soldiers and that they began to sense a feeling of opposition as one effect of the opposition occurring in the United States.
See also: Lists of protests against the Vietnam War.
The protest on June 23 in Los Angeles is singularly significant. It was one of the first massive war protests in the United States and the first in Los Angeles. Ending in a clash with riot police, it set a pattern for the massive protests which followed and due to the size and violence of this event, Johnson attempted no further public speeches in venues outside military bases.
† Traditional peace groups like Fellowship of Reconciliation, American Friends Service Committee, the Bruderhof, War Resisters League, and the Catholic Workers Movement, became involved in the antiwar movement as well.
† Various committees and campaigns for peace in Vietnam came about, including Campaign for Disarmament, Campaign to End the Air War, Campaign to Stop Funding the War, Campaign to Stop the Air War, Catholic Peace Fellowship, and Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors.