Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War reached a substantial scale in 1965 with demonstrations against the country's escalating role in the war. Over the next several years, these demonstrations grew into a social movement which was incorporated into the broader counterculture of the 1960s.
Members of the peace movement within the United States at first consisted of many students, mothers, and anti-establishment youth. Opposition grew with the participation of leaders and activists of the civil rights, feminist, and Chicano movements, as well as sectors of organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups, including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, military veterans, physicians (notably Benjamin Spock), and others.
Anti-war demonstrations consisted mostly of peaceful, nonviolent protests. By 1967, an increasing number of Americans considered military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake. This was echoed decades later by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
US military involvement in Vietnam began in 1950 with the support of French forces fighting against the Việt Minh in the First Indochina War. Military involvement and opposition escalated after the Congressional authorization of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August 1964, with US ground troops 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 eventually (after US involvement in the Vietnam War was over) ending the draft. Nixon began the drawdown of US troops in April 1969. Protests spiked after the announcement of the expansion of the war into Cambodia in April 1970. The Pentagon Papers were published in June 1971. The last US combat troops withdrew from Vietnam in August 1972, and the last draftees reported in early 1973.
Background
Causes of opposition
The draft, a system of conscription that mainly drew from minorities and lower and middle-class whites, inspired much of the protest after 1965. Conscientious objectors played an active role despite their small numbers. Student and blue-collar American opposition to the military draft was compelled by a sentiment that the draft was unfairly administered.
Opposition to the war arose during a time of unprecedented student activism, which included the free speech movement and the civil rights movement. The military draft mobilized the baby-boomers, who were most at risk of being drafted, but the opposition 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.
Anti-War protesters primarily made moral arguments against US involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, preceding the Quaker protests but just after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the American Friends Service Committee bought a page in The New York Times to protest what seemed to be the tendency of the US to step into Indochina as France was stepping out. 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". Civilian deaths, which had been downplayed or omitted entirely by the Western media, became a subject of protest when photographic evidence of casualties emerged. The infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shooting a Viet Cong captain in handcuffs during the Tet Offensive also provoked public outcry.
Another element of the American opposition to the war was the perception that US 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 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.
Media coverage of the war also shook citizens at home as the television, which had become common in American homes in the 1950s, brought images of the wartime conflict to viewers in their homes. Newscasters, like NBC's Frank McGee, stated that the war was all but lost as a "conclusion to be drawn inescapably from the facts." 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 rejected this view of how the media influenced the war, on the basis that in their view that the media instead censored the more brutal images of the fighting and the death of millions of innocent people.
Polarization
If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam."
The US became polarized over the war. Many supporters of US involvement argued for what was known as the domino theory, a theory that stated that if one country fell to communism, then the bordering countries would be sure to fall as well like 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 US-backed 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. In 1965, the majority of media attention was focused on military tactics with very little discussion about the necessity of a full-scale intervention in Southeast Asia. After 1965, the media covered the dissent and domestic controversy that existed within the United States, but mostly excluded the expressed views of dissidents and resisters.
The media established a sphere of public discourse around the Hawk versus Dove debate. The Doves were people who had liberal views and were critics of the war. Doves claimed that the war was well-intended, but a disastrous mistake in an otherwise benign foreign policy. The Doves did not question the intentions of the US in intervening in Vietnam, nor did they question the morality or legality of the US intervention. Instead, they made pragmatic claims that the war was a mistake. Contrarily, the Hawks represented people who argued that the war was legitimate, winnable, and part of US 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 caused the US to lose the war. Conservative 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 liberal media was responsible for the growing popular disenchantment with the war and blamed Western media for losing the war in Southeast Asia.
History
Early protests
Early protests were relatively small. On May 2, 1964, for example, slightly less than eighty protesters marched against the war in Harvard Square, just outside the gates of Harvard University.
The first large-scale protest, organized primarily by Students for a Democratic Society, was in Washington, D.C., on April 17, 1965. More than 20,000 people are believed to have participated.
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. Draft card protests were primarily aimed at the immoral conduct of the war, rather than the draft itself.
At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft-able age were actually being conscripted, but the Draft Board in each locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt in cases 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.
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.
Government reactions
Throughout the Vietnam War, presidents of the United States included John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and ended with Richard Nixon. President Johnson felt compelled to defend the South Vietnamese government against North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Johnson and many of his advisors also feared a communist takeover in the region as part of the larger context of the United States' Cold War with the Soviet Union. However, as a result of such involvement in the war, US citizens began to protest the war.
The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the US 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.
An alternate example would be the Pentagon Riot of 1967. During this riot, a crowd of some 35 thousand individuals took to the US Pentagon, with some scaling the walls and forcing their way inside the Pentagon. Troops attempted to ease the riot and the Deputy Marshals made 682 arrests with 47 individuals being injured during the incident. In 1970, moving into the Nixon administration, protestors crowded around the Washington Monument in protest of the war, and Nixon drove down there to attempt to speak with them and listen to their views. Another incident occurred in 1971 when thousands of protestors took to the streets in Washington, D.C., and built temporary barricades to halt traffic. As a result, the Nixon administration sent a police force and arrested about 7 thousand protestors. This however, did not stop the anti-war movement, and protests continued into January 1973 until the end of US involvement in Vietnam.
Shifting opinion
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, pseudo scientific justification for the policies of the US 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. 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. 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."
Draft protests
In 1967, the continued operation of the draft system, then calling for as many as 40,000 men for induction each month, fueled a burgeoning draft resistance movement. The draft exhibited a disproportionate selection of young African American men and economically disadvantaged men of all races, resulting in higher enlistment rates compared to white, middle-class men. In 1967, although there were fewer draft-eligible black men (29% of all draft-eligible men) compared to white men (63%), a higher percentage of the eligible black men (64% of the 29%) were chosen for conscription to serve in the war, as opposed to only 31% of eligible white men.
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 chose to prosecute 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.