Anti-Vietnam War Movement

I

Introduction

Anti-Vietnam War Movement, political movement protesting United States involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). The anti-Vietnam War movement was the most vocal and sustained antiwar movement in the nation’s history. It began in the early 1960s in response to increased U.S. participation in Vietnam. The movement eventually encompassed thousands of different groups and millions of people who participated in loosely organized protests to convince their fellow citizens, as well as their elected officials, that the war was wrong. By 1972 opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam had become a mainstream, if still controversial, political viewpoint.

The war protesters were inspired, in part, by the citizen-activism of the civil rights movement, in which ordinary people worked to change government policy. Most demonstrators practiced nonviolent tactics that included marches, protest rallies, teach-ins, and petitions. In addition, hundreds of thousands of young men refused to cooperate with the military draft; they burned draft cards and declared themselves conscientious objectors (individuals who refuse to serve in the military because they oppose war in any form). Many refused to obey draft notices telling them to report for possible military duty. A much smaller group of antiwar protesters embraced more radical tactics; they disrupted draft boards, bombed and destroyed government property, and declared their support for America’s Communist enemies in Vietnam.

II

American Involvement in Vietnam

Direct U.S. involvement in Vietnam began in the mid-1950s after the Vietnamese had won their independence from France, which had colonized the country in the 19th century. After nearly nine years of fighting, the French defeat came at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 when the Vietnamese destroyed a major French military base. Following the French withdrawal, Vietnam was temporarily divided into North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

Elections were to be held in 1956 to create an independent, unified Vietnam. However, U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower feared that the Viet Minh, who had defeated the French and taken control of North Vietnam, would win the election. The Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, were Communists, and the Eisenhower administration was afraid that if Communists ruled Vietnam then other Asian nations would also fall to the forces of Communism. This idea was known as the domino theory, the belief that if one Asian country became Communist, the others would topple one after another like a row of standing dominoes. The president of South Vietnam refused to hold the 1956 elections, claiming that the people in North Vietnam would not be allowed to have free elections.

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To prevent the Communists from dominating the government of South Vietnam, Eisenhower, and later President John Kennedy, spent billions of dollars trying to create a pro-American, non-Communist nation in South Vietnam. Americans called this program “nation building,” and hoped that Vietnam would become a showcase for American leadership in other developing countries. The United States sent teams of military, academic, and governmental experts to South Vietnam to build a strong military and a stable economy. American advisers urged the leaders of South Vietnam to begin a massive land reform program in the countryside, which would redistribute farmland, and to end corrupt practices in the government and military. South Vietnamese leaders accepted U.S. financial and military aid. However, they undertook very few of the reform measures advised by the Americans to restructure South Vietnamese society.

By 1963 President Kennedy knew the United States had a major problem: After eight years of nation building, few Vietnamese supported the South Vietnamese government. Worse, South Vietnamese guerrillas, known as the National Liberation Front (NLF), along with North Vietnamese soldiers, had begun a serious effort to defeat the American-supported government and reunify Vietnam.

As the situation in Vietnam deteriorated, Lyndon Johnson, who had become president in 1963, faced increasing pressure to take additional action to support South Vietnam. During the 1964 presidential election campaign, Johnson’s Republican opponent, Senator Barry Goldwater, attacked Johnson’s Vietnam policy, declaring that the Democrat was about to lose Vietnam to the Communists. Johnson believed he had to act. He saw his opportunity in August 1964, when U.S. ships off the coast of North Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin, reported sonar indications of a torpedo attack; however, there was no visual confirmation of an attack.

In response, Johnson ordered an air attack on North Vietnamese ship bases and oil storage facilities. While the attack occurred, the president appeared on television and explained the action he had taken to the American people. The next day, at the president’s request, the U.S. Senate passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed the president, “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the armed forces of the United States and to prevent any further armed aggression.” Using this authority, in March 1965 Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder, a sustained air attack on North Vietnam. During the same month, the first ground troops arrived in Vietnam. Thus, by early 1965 the United States had begun a massive ground and air war in Southeast Asia.

III

Beginnings of the Movement

In the 1950s and early 1960s few Americans, at first, opposed U.S. government policy in Vietnam. Public attention was focused on global confrontations between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Berlin and Cuba. However, when U.S. policy in Vietnam moved from nation building to military engagement, some Americans began to question their leaders.

At first, from roughly 1964 to 1965, the most vocal opponents of the Vietnam War were groups that most Americans considered radical. These were organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and a host of pacifist, religious, Communist, and Socialist organizations. Members of these groups tended to argue that America’s involvement in the war was immoral because the Vietnamese were engaged in a civil war, rather than being attacked by a foreign power. The involvement of the United States in Vietnam, they protested, was an attempt by a global superpower to force its will on a Third World nation. According to these protestors, the war was being fought not to help the Vietnamese but to increase America’s economic and military power.

Before the Vietnam War, most Americans believed that U.S. foreign policy was based primarily on morality. The antiwar movement caused Americans to consider the charge that power politics and economic expansion, not moral principles, were at the heart of America’s global mission. Many found this assessment troubling. However, many others believed that U.S. policy in Vietnam was driven by a morally acceptable goal of halting Communism.

In 1965 the SDS called for the first national demonstration against America’s rapidly escalating military role in Vietnam. On April 17 about 20,000 people rallied on the grounds of the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C. SDS president Paul Potter claimed, “The incredible war in Vietnam has provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting edge that has finally severed the last vestiges of illusion that morality and democracy are the guiding principles of American foreign policy.” In the years ahead, while only a small minority of Americans would embrace the radical goals of the SDS, many millions would ponder this claim about U.S. foreign policy.

Following this first rally, another kind of antiwar protest began to spread at America’s universities. Students and professors, troubled by the war, began a series of “teach-ins” about Vietnam. One of the first was held at the University of Michigan in March 1965. These people did not trust the information reported by the mass media or provided by government officials; they began to seek out additional information and interpretations about the war in Vietnam. Teach-ins and the subsequent creation of newsletters, underground newspapers, alternative radio shows, and other forums became powerful features of the antiwar movement.

By the mid-1960s antiwar groups and protests had begun to spring up around the country. In Brooklyn, New York, residents picketed a company that manufactured napalm, a chemical weapon used by the military in Vietnam. Not far away, in Manhattan, a Lutheran pastor started Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. Across the country, in Berkeley, California, students and community residents formed the Vietnam Day Committee and held sit-ins on railroad tracks in an attempt to stop troop trains from leaving the Bay area. Students at the University of Chicago took over the administration building to protest their school’s cooperation with draft boards. Although they were still a small minority, protesters were starting to make the Vietnam War a major political issue.

IV

Expansion of the Movement

By 1967 the antiwar movement had grown dramatically. Joining the radical opponents of the war and draft resisters were millions of Americans who believed that the U.S. government had made a tragic mistake in attempting to wage a land war in Asia. These less radical protesters, sometimes called “doves,” or more disparagingly, “peaceniks,” became the rank and file marchers in the hundreds of local and national antiwar protests that began around the country. Through marches and protest rallies, they hoped to convince President Johnson and their fellow citizens that the Vietnam War was doomed to failure. They argued that too many Vietnamese saw the United States not as their liberator but as a foreign oppressor. Many of these moderate antiwar protestors saw the conflict in Vietnam as civil war, being waged to unite a nation that had suffered through decades of foreign rule. They believed that it was a mistake to view the conflict as a battle between Communists and anti-Communists.

Increasingly, well-respected, even mainstream figures began to oppose the war. Arkansas Democratic senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, began holding hearings about U.S. policy in Vietnam in 1966. Fulbright wanted basic answers: Why was the United States fighting in Vietnam? How did the United States propose to win? After grilling Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Fulbright concluded that American policy was wrongheaded and doomed to failure. Fulbright, like other antiwar moderates, decided that the conflict in Vietnam was a civil war and by 1967 he had become an outspoken opponent of the war. On Christmas Day, 1966, the New York Times began a series of reports from Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, indicating that President Johnson had misled the country when he said that only military targets were being bombed in North Vietnam. In April 1967 civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke out against the war, saying: “I opposed the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it, not in anger, but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart...This war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for.”

In 1968 supporters of the Democratic Party split over the Vietnam War. Many moderate antiwar activists supported the presidential candidacies of Senator Eugene McCarthy or Senator Robert Kennedy, who both opposed the war. Despite winning almost all of the open Democratic Party state primaries, the antiwar forces were not successful. Although President Johnson did decide not to run again, the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey (see Chicago Convention of 1968). Humphrey had won the support of most of the party’s leaders, who still controlled the nominating process. During the convention about 15,000 people, both radicals and moderates, protested both the war and the process by which Humphrey had been nominated. These protesters clashed with police, and the violence in the streets of Chicago was televised across the nation.

Although the antiwar movement had grown significantly, the majority of Americans still believed that public protests against the war, like those at the Chicago convention, were unpatriotic while American troops were fighting. The Republican candidate for the presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon, blasted antiwar protesters for that reason. He told Americans that he would bring “peace with honor” to Vietnam. Many Americans found that pledge comforting, even though Nixon never explained what he meant by it; indeed, he later admitted that he had no real plan to end the war. With Democrats divided over the war, Nixon won the presidency.

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