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.