|
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
|
|
|
(0 vote)