Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee: A Personal View of the Anti-war Movement

A Personal View of the Movement to End the Viet Nam War

Revised from presentation at a colloquy on "1968" sponsored by Temas, Havana, Cuba
November 8, 2018

by John McAuliff

It is an honor to participate in this colloquy with such an illustrious group of presenters. My thanks to the sponsors for this rare opportunity: La Acadamia de la Historia de Cuba, La Universidad de Nanterre, y La Revista Temas.

I am approaching this topic from the perspective of a participant, as an artifact from a movement half a century in the past, not as an academic. I can attest to the authenticity of my views, but not to their objectivity or universality. I am going to use my time to provide an overview of this historic movement that for the first and only time in US history helped to stop a war.

Before I graduated from university in 1964, I wrote a paper about the little noted conflict in Viet Nam. At the time, there were 23,300 US military advisers in country. Then I went off to work in the Mississippi Summer Project of the civil rights movement to register voters and three months later to the Peace Corps in Peru.

On February 13, 1965 while I was working with campesinos in Cuzco, the US began bombing northern Viet Nam. Traditional peace groups and student activists organized protests in perhaps two dozen locations with at most a few hundred participants. The first teach-in was held six weeks later at the University of Michigan on March 24, 1965. That spring thousands of students and professors heard lectures and argued about the war and what should be done about it at over 100 campuses. The US government initially sent representatives to advocate for the war, but stopped when they saw that their presence was generating more opposition. The first large national peace demonstration was organized by the new left SDS, Students for a Democratic Society on April 14, 1965 and brought 20,000 people to Washington. Seven months later, 30,000 protested in Washington under the banner of SANE, an older liberal peace organization that was formed to advocate for a sane nuclear policy. SDS supported that demonstration reluctantly, and made from the speakers’ stand a much appreciated more direct and radical critique of the cold war liberals carrying out the war in the Johnson Administration. Nevertheless a Gallup poll in October showed 64% of Americans supported the war.

When I returned to the US in 1966, US troop levels in Viet Nam had mushroomed to 385,300 plus 60,000 sailors offshore. More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers died that year and an estimated ten times that many National Liberation Front combatants, a.k.a. Viet Cong. The war had emerged as a major national issue. This led to more discontent in the US. 48% of Americans still supported the war in May, but opposition was spreading and had grown to 35%.

The party line of the Democrats began to crack when critical nationally televised hearings were held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee led by J. William Fulbright, his acknowledged response to the previous year's protests. Anti-war activism was focused on campuses and in communities. Silent vigils and counseling for young men who were eligible for the draft were common. There were smaller national demonstrations but sectarian political differences and rivalries, most notably between the Old Left of the Communist Party and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, frustrated the emergence of a national antiwar -movement.

In 1967 the war grew larger and the peace movement finally got organized. 485,600 troops were on the ground and deaths rose to 9,377. At great political cost, Martin Luther King brought together the defining issues of the decade, civil rights and peace, in a prophetic April 4th speech at Riverside Church in New York. Days later he was at the head of a march of 300,000 in New York. Vietnam Summer, my own first job as an anti-war activist, took the movement off campus all over the US, laying the ground for peace candidates in Congressional and Presidential campaigns. Veterans and former Peace Corps Volunteers, lawyers and business people, clergy and lay activists came together through newspaper ads and new organizations. (I came to be the head of one of them, the Committee of Returned Volunteers. More on that later.)

Burning draft cards

An essential vehicle for carrying out the war, Selective Service (the draft) became a major focus for opposition. Beginning in October, a movement arose of young men who burned or returned their draft cards. This symbolic action was illegal and decisions not to cooperate with the draft could lead to imprisonment. Over the course of the war, 200,000 young men were cited for draft violations, 25,000 sent to trial, and 4,000 imprisoned for an average of two years. More militant confrontations with local authorities were seen at the Oakland Stop the Draft Week and in protests at the University of Wisconsin against Dow Chemical, the maker of napalm and, learned only later, Agent Orange, the defoliant that is still wreaking havoc in Vietnam with birth defects. (The way I dealt with the draft was to seek and ultimately receive status as a conscientious objector, although I was not really qualified because my opposition was specifically to the Vietnam war.)

Arrests on the steps of the Pentagon

The movement publicly redefined its goal as From Protest to Resistance on October 21st. 100,000 rallied at the Lincoln Memorial, and half marched on to the Pentagon. More than 600 were arrested, most peacefully sitting on the Pentagon steps, myself among them. Catholic activists led by the Berrigan brothers a week later began symbolic but real attacks on local draft boards, pouring blood on files or burning them. The year ended with more anti-draft demonstrations and card turn-ins as well as the announcement by Senator Eugene McCarthy that he would run as a candidate for President in opposition to Lyndon Johnson and the war.

Self exile to Canada and Europe grew among those facing the draft as well as among discontented military. Reminiscent of the anti-slavery campaign, an underground railway of middle class activists assisted draft resistors and deserters to escape authorities. One source reports about 100,000 Americans fled abroad to avoid being called up with some 90 percent going to Canada. Thousands of others went into hiding within the country, sometimes changing their identities. In addition about 1,000 military deserters entered Canada

1968, the focus of this colloquium, witnessed the height (or the depth) of the war and the anti-war movement. US troop numbers peaked at 536,100 with 14,589 deaths. Public opinion began the year with a plurality of 46 % feeling the war was a mistake. By seven months later 54% felt that way. The Tet Offensive shattered US illusions that the war was being won and cost tens of thousands of Vietnamese lives on both sides of the conflict. Surprisingly strong vote totals for Eugene McCarthy brought Bobby Kennedy into the race and led Lyndon Johnson to withdraw as a candidate for reelection. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy provoked urban riots and political despair.

Police riot against protestors on Michigan Avenue in Chicago

Inside the Democratic Convention

The focal point of struggle was the national convention in Chicago of the Democratic Party. Different tendencies within the peace movement did their own thing, ranging from counter cultural Yippies (organized hippies) and a confront-the-police faction of SDS to anti-war activists such as our group of former Peace Corps volunteers seeking to support similar sentiment among delegates. A large non-violent march that we were asked to lead was viciously attacked by the Chicago police just as it joined up with the symbolic mule train from Dr. King’s Poor Peoples Campaign, the opening act of what was officially described as a police riot. The Mayor of Chicago undertook his own form of verbal riot on the convention floor. The post-assassination post-Chicago alienation of activists led to votes for protest candidates instead of the Democrat’s nominee (including my own for Dr. Benjamin Spock)--even after Hubert Humphrey broke with Johnson on the war. (During 1968 I turned in my draft cards and refused to perform civilian alternative service during a demonstration at the Justice Department protesting the arrest of Dr. Spock and four others for counseling draft resistance.)

October 1969 Moratorium

As a result Richard Nixon became President and the war lasted five years longer. Another 15,000 Americans would die. While reducing the number of troops on the ground as part of Vietnamizing the war, Nixon increased bombing in the north and broadened the conflict to Cambodia with the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk, “secret” bombing and the “incursion” of US forces, creating conditions for the post-war horror of Khmer Rouge rule. Anti-war protest also broadened with nationwide and national Moratorium protests in October and November 1969, despite the real but partial reduction in US troop numbers and casualties. (475,200 and 9,414 respectively) (During this year, I discovered I was under indictment for refusing to carry out alternative service--and so could not be part of a delegation I had organized from the Committee of Returned Volunteers to visit Cuba. Subsequently I agreed to do alternative service in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I spent much of my personal time doing anti-war organizing and working on the "underground" newspaper.)

November 1969 Mobilization in Washington

The deadly shooting of students at Kent and Jackson State Universities in May 1970 in protest of the Cambodia incursion expanded already widespread student strikes to hundreds of universities. National demonstrations continued in Washington, with the most dramatic occurring in April 1971 when Vietnam veterans threw their medals of war at the Capitol building. Days later hundreds of thousands marched in peaceful protest. Later in the month May Day brought several days of a more militant response. Some 10,000 were arrested for civil disobedience, for trying to shut down normal business in the Capital. (I was among them.) Anti-war energy was not diminished by the fact that US troops were down to 200,000 and the year’s death total had fallen to 1,381.

Anti-war violence had also become more common. Dozens of ROTC military training buildings on campuses, a research facility and several Bank of America branches were destroyed. SDS fractured into self-described Maoist and Marxist-Leninist factions, some immersing themselves in factory jobs. Most notorious was the Weathermen faction underground campaign of bombings that did nothing to end the war but permanently damaged the reputation of the movement.

Nixon announced the end of the draft in 1972, a year when troop levels were down to 24,200 and US deaths totaled 300. After the Paris Peace Agreement in 1973, the last US combat forces were withdrawn. As US troop levels and casualties fell, opposition to the war grew to 60%, but activism declined. After the last American soldier had left Viet Nam, residual anti-war sentiment focused on a sophisticated campaign of grass roots lobbying for legislation to stop US bombing and restrict US military aid led by the Indochina Peace Campaign and my office in the Peace Education Division of the American Friends Service Committee . US intentions to maintain a client state in the south failed when the South Vietnamese government collapsed in 1975 because of loss of morale, diminishing military supplies and inability to fight on its own.

Reflections:

The main factor driving the anti-war movement was the war itself, which is to say the unwillingness of the Vietnamese to surrender their "independence and freedom" -- in Ho Chi Minh’s famous words,. The daily carnage reported freely by the US media violated the values and sense of rightness of many Americans. Initial objection came from traditional pacifists and progressive political activists for whom any war or any exercise of cold war adventurism was unacceptable. The movement broadened as the oft-proclaimed assumption of self-defensive anti-communism was overcome by knowledge of the history of US intervention and of Vietnam itself. At root the case could not be made under serious scrutiny that this was a Just War or in US national interest.

The draft and US deaths made a war that lacked legitimacy an existential issue for young men, their families and friends. To the normal human aversion to being killed in war was added the feeling that the loss would not be for a worthy reason. That sentiment spread through the Vietnam generation, most quickly on campuses where young adults were structurally exposed to open debate and critical histories, interacted constantly in classrooms and dormitories and could feel their collective strength--as well as endangerment. Doubt spread generationally upwards and outwards, family argument by family argument. The questioning of the war on campuses and in the media and its delegitimization by prominent cultural icons promoted disquiet in ever growing circles. At times it caused anger at disloyal protesters but also at the unfairness of being forced into danger by a discriminatory draft or economic pressures.

Finally I want to touch on the factor of solidarity in the anti-war movement. It took two forms, symbolic and personal. On the symbolic side activists expressed their growing radicalization by carrying the blue and red National Liberation Front flag in demonstrations and chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win”. This distressed some protest organizers who feared public alignment with an enemy that was killing Americans would narrow the appeal of the message for peace.

A different kind of solidarity was expressed by activists who had worked with South Vietnamese civilians under sponsorship of Quakers, Mennonites and the secular International Voluntary Service. Most returned to the US deeply opposed to the cost the war was exacting on South Vietnamese civilians. A few made it their full time work for several years to carry this message of common humanity to the grass roots.

My colleagues in the Committee of Returned Volunteers had a less direct but expansive version. They identified the rural peasant victims of the war with the people they had worked with around the world. It also motivated their interest to expose flaws and contradictions of US policy in the countries where they had served, an experientially grounded and non-rhetorical anti-imperialism.

In addition, a relatively few political activists met the North Vietnamese and NLF representatives in third countries like Hungary, Canada, France, Sweden and Cuba. About 200 traveled to the north and liberated areas of the south. The meetings were motivational because the story told by Vietnamese participants about their own lives was extraordinary—as were they. The American activists often wrote about the meetings and incorporated them into speeches. The encounters also benefited Vietnamese morale, boosting the political theme that their struggle was winnable because the enemy was the US government not the American people. At times the Americans carried away an over-romanticized impression that was vulnerable to disenchantment in the first harsh years after the war ended.

Five years ago I co-led a visit to Vietnam by activists who had shown great courage by visiting the enemy country of North Vietnam in war time. For many of them it was not easy to absorb the imperfect equity of a very successful market economy for which the US had become the largest export market, a major investor, a primary source of tourists and a prized ally in fending off new yet very old threats to sovereignty and territorial integrity from China. For others it was disturbing to see that long after the war had ended in a context of phenomenal economic development Vietnam was still a one party state imprisoning internal critics who stepped over the line, less restictive than twenty years ago but a line. Heartening was to discover a process of self generated national reconciliation through which many tens of thousands of Vietnamese exiles or their children had returned to live, work and invest in the country.

Our group produced a book about each person’s experience during the war and impressions upon returning, as well as what they had done in the intervening half century, “The People Make the Peace”. As well as being an organizer, I was entitled to be part of the group because my first arrival in Hanoi was on the same day the US war totally collapsed in Saigon, April 30, 1975. If I have not overrun my time, I will end by sharing a few slides from those days.