FREE ESSAY ON ANTI-VIETNAM MOVEMENT IN U.S.

ANTI-VIETNAM MOVEMENT IN U.S.

Anti-Vietnam Movement in the U.S.
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 of1964, 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 playingleading roles. These teach-ins were mass public
demonstrations, usually held in the spring and fall seasons. By 1968, protestersnumbered
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 interestof all the big decision-makers and their advisors.
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. 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 ofwhat 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. 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. 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 inearly 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 withsupport for our boys in Vietnam.. 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. For example, to join the
November 1969 antiwarMobilization, a unit boycotted its Thanksgiving Day dinner. 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. 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.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.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. 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 marcherswere unable to levitate the besieged Pentagon, their
activities ultimately contributed to the redirection of the American policy inVietnam by
1968-and the destruction of the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson finally
realized-the energized antiwar forces spelled the beginning of the end for American
involvement in the war. 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. 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. 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 understandhow the current
generation of young people could include both brave young marines and hippies and
draft-card burners. 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. 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 readyfor 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.. 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. Many of
Nixon's activities during the second week of May revolved around the Kent State crisis.
On May 6, he met with thedelegation 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. 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
andsize 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'spresidency 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 militarycommitments in Vietnam. The struggle of the
American minds was over, for there would be no more Vietnams in the near future. 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 inVietnam. At times, some of their activities, as displayed
by the media, may have produced a patriotic backlash. 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. 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.