Opposition to the Vietnam War—composed of leftist college students, pacifist religious groups, peace activists, and citizens of all ages—clearly indicated the divisive effects of the war on American society. Beginning as early as April 1965 with a march on Washington that consisted of more than 25,000 people, the antiwar movement served as a common cause for the growing counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s and a major component of the social turbulence of the same period.
Various impulses including the fear of being drafted, a commitment to peace, and the loyalty of a small minority to Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary ideology transformed college campuses into staging grounds for antiwar rallies and “teach-ins”—lengthy series of speeches denouncing the war and the United States’s involvement in it. In October 1965 the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (“the Mobe”) organized more than 80,000 people in demonstrations nationwide and disrupted the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. On November 15, 1969, nearly a quarter million people marched against the war in Washington, D. C. The most famous incident connected with the antiwar movement occurred in May 1970 on the campus of Kent State University, where Ohio National Guardsmen fatally shot four students while dispersing an antiwar demonstration. In addition to protests, demonstrations, and teach-ins, young men protested the war by burning draft cards, failing to register, or fleeing to Canada or other countries. By 1972 more than 30,000 “draft dodgers” had fled to Canada and thousands more to Sweden or Mexico. During the war, more than half a million men committed draft violations.
Many clergymen, educators, and businessmen disapproved of the government’s Vietnam policies beginning in the mid-1960s, and their numbers continued to grow throughout the conflict. This growth, fueled by the constant flow of war images into America’s living rooms via television, reflected a trend in public opinion that, by mid-1971, was solidly in favor of U. S. withdrawal from the war even if such withdrawal meant the collapse of the South Vietnamese government.
There was also political opposition to the war. In 1966 Senator William Fulbright initiated public hearings to determine whether pursuing the war in Vietnam served the national interest. Disillusion with the war grew throughout President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. Secretary of
Arms race 29
Defense Robert McNamara worked quietly to reduce U. S. military presence in Vietnam and resigned after failing to persuade Johnson to do so. More significant politically was the growing influence of the antiwar faction in Congress. In June 1973, Senators Frank Church of Idaho and Clifford Case of New Jersey wrote into the fiscal 1974 budget an amendment forbidding the use of any American forces “in or over” Indochina, thus removing the guarantee of American air support if South Vietnam was attacked again. Other fiscal reductions followed when Congress reduced military aid to South Vietnam from $2.1 billion in 1973 to $1.1 billion in 1974 and $700 million in 1975. On March 20, 1975, Senators Adlai Stevenson III and Charles Mathias introduced legislation requiring the termination of all aid to South Vietnam by June 30 of that year.
This increased congressional opposition to American aid and involvement in Indochina reflected a crack in the anticommunist consensus in foreign policy. During the 1970s the leadership of the Democratic Party had concluded that ideological anticommunism had been detrimental to the country and had led to American involvement in Vietnam. Because of this, during President James Earl Carter, Jr.’s administration, Democrats refused to react aggressively to the growing military power of the Soviet Union. Mozambique, Angola, and Ethiopia all came under pro-Soviet rule in 1975. Soviet encroachment occurred in other areas throughout the late 1970s but the Carter administration opted for a policy of conciliation, hoping to allay any Soviet fears. In 1977 Carter canceled the B-1 bomber program, as well as the neutron bomb program, and asked for no Soviet concessions in return.
The influence of the protest activity and public opinion is still debated by scholars. It is clear that the antiwar movement in the United States boosted North Vietnamese morale by convincing Hanoi that America’s spirit to fight would certainly wither. It is likely that the movement figured prominently in President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for reelection in 1968 and played possibly a larger role in Richard M. Nixon’s victory over the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, who, as Johnson’s vice president, was unable to dissociate himself from the president’s war policies. Also, the dramatic nature of the protests and the power of public opinion may ultimately have set the parameters of the conflict and prevented an even wider war. Clearly the antiwar movement contributed to America’s “neo-isolationist” sentiment that was manifested after the war by a strong public distaste for the assumption of responsibility for other nations’ affairs.
See also arms race; “Chicago Eight”; cold war;
Defense policy; LIBERALISM.
Further reading: Charles DeBenedetti, An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (New
York: Syracuse University Press, 1990); Kenneth Heine-man, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement and American State Universities in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1993).
—William L. Glankler
World History
