How much did anti-Vietnam War protests do to end US involvement in Vietnam, or at least to turn public sentiment against the war? It was before my time.
Also use this as an open thread to discuss OWS.
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geg6
They did exactly as much to end Vietnam as the ones before the Iraq invasion did to stop that.
IMHO, it took the Tet Offensive and Walter Cronkite to make the Village finally get serious about ending the war. Those were the things that made Real Merkins start looking at the war as a losing proposition. And even then, it took several more years to actually end.
Malaclypse
See here.
Console
Seems like all they managed to do was get nixon elected
Martin
Ending involvement? They did fuck-all to end involvement. Wars end when their goals are met or when they become intractable – either politically or militarily. Vietnam became intractable in both senses. Iraq sorta did both. Goals more-or-less met and became intractable politically (for the Iraqi govt. who asked us to leave). Afghanistan seems to be going along similar lines, but is complicated by also being a shadow war against Pakistan, which is just monumentally fucked up.
Brian R.
What geg6 said.
gbear
I graduated in 72 so I’m a bit young for the protests too (guys my age were extremely unlikely to have to go to Nam), but it seems to me that the protests were a big part of the reason that Johnson didn’t run for a second term.
The deaths at Kent State also put a lot of people in the anti-war camp. If anyone dies at the hands of police in the #OWS movement, next summer is going to be insane.
Brachiator
You could also compare OWS to the Bonus Army.
It is a big mistake to try to limit OWS comparisons to the 60s.
Egilsson
I think they did a lot, partly by forcing Congressional action, which lead to Nixon lying (Xmas bombing in Laos among other things).
The bottom line is the Vietnam protesters were right. The Serious People who made dumb claims about the Domino theory and that US prestige would be harmed by “abandoning” South Vietnam were all wrong.
The dirty hippies did accomplish a lot, and they were right. They almost always have been right for the past 40 years. The only significant movement that was silly was the nuclear freeze movement.
The civil rights protesters accomplished a lot more of course, but it’s hard to compare with that. They are the standard to which all protests should be judged. That’s how great MLK was.
Peace, like war, requires boots on the ground.
capt
Anti-war movements have never stopped war but we have always informed and educated some of the misinformed and uneducated. How can one measure the effect? Was it a wildly successful movement if it only shortened a war – probably not but it is also never a waste of time.
eemom
I don’t think the Vietnam war protests are a good point of comparison to OWS, if that’s what you’re getting at here.
JPL
Because of the draft, everyone either lost someone or knew someone who lost someone. It was very costly with no end in sight. I agree with geg6 about the demonstrations except for one, Kent State. The murder of students brought to the forefront the mess we were in.
Gin & Tonic
Public sentiment turned against the war when it started being televised during the evening network news. The protests did little or nothing to end the war, although “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” contributed to ending his presidential ambitions.
trollhattan
It got LBJ to decide not to run and gifted us with Nixon (unintended consequences, anybody?). Other than that, nuttin’.
In honor of open thread–the very first mention I’ve seen of Michael Reagan possibly challenging Feinstein for senate.
Bog help us all (much like we elected the dumb Bush, Michael’s the dumb Reagan) and apologies to the nation if California does something this profoundly stoopid.
http://www.examiner.com/statehouse-in-sacramento/hetch-hetchy-debate-could-drown-feinstein-2012
geg6
@eemom:
I agree. I see no similarities at all.
drunken hausfrau
They didn’t change the involvement… but I would argue that they DID change public sentiment/support for the war. The tipping point was when the protesters starting looking a lot like the neighbors — not their kids, the folks! I remember distinctly when my friend’s mom was the one holding a sign and marching — suburban housewife in heels marches on DC. I remember it made a huge impact on my parents and others in the neighborhood… and then, almost as if they had always been against the war, suddenly everyone was complaining about the war. Protests may not have ended it — but they did sour it.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Egilsson:
Of course, the hippies were right for all the wrong reasons, thus 40 years later they’re still the boogeymen we get when anything left of Limbaugh gets any purchase. Because hey, EVERYONE hates hippies, even when they’re right, so you don’t wanna be a Dirty Fucking Smelly Anti-American War-Hating hippie, right?!
Mouse Tolliver
I got a call from Quinnipiac yesterday. How dorky is it that I was actually excited to get the chance to represent for Anti-Tea Party/Pro-OWS, Liberal-Independent community?
Ben Cisco
The Steven J. Baum firm should go viral. I’m doing my part.
Gin & Tonic
@Egilsson:
Actually, according to Richard Rhodes in Arsenals of Folly the nuclear freeze movement actually did contribute to the Reykjavik agreement, or set a tone in which that agreement could take place.
geg6
@JPL:
Yes, Kent State definitely had an impact, but the die had already been cast. Tet and the Cronkite piece (for those not familiar with this: https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/Cronkite_1968.html) both happened well before Kent State and you can go back and look at public opinion polls of the time and see the impact that Tet and Cronkite had on Real Merkan opinion.
karl
The anti-war sentiment I heard most often while growing up in the ’60-’70s was “we shouldn’t be there if we don’t want to win.” That growing dissatisfaction began with Tet and grew alongside TV news reports from the front lines that looked grittier than many felt comfortable with.
I don’t think the protesters were ever popular but they kept the public eye focused on a negative view of the war — making possible the “I don’t like those hippies but we can’t keep going in Vietnam like we’re going” line that most Americans finally adopted.
Anoniminous
@Console:
Nixon’s election had as much, if not more, to do with Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act.
trollhattan
@geg6:
I recall the cheers from certain, ahem, smelly corners of the Merkan populace when Cronkite died, because he “lost” Vietnam.
Yeah, they’re that stupid.
artem1s
most important effect of 60s protest was the change in voting age. maybe too many 18 year olds don’t vote but at least they have the right to register a complaint when some war hawk wants to use them for cannon fodder.
and whether they ended the war or involvement is irrelevant IMHO. participation of some sort was the real victory as it is with OWS. you can’t have a good government unless you are willing to be part of a good government.
Tom Hilton
@Console: There were a lot of other factors (urban unrest scaring the shit out of white suburbanites being one of them), but I think it’s fair to say the anti-war protests contributed to Nixon’s election.
And yeah, it’s hard to pin down exactly what impact they had on public opinion, but I really doubt that the protests themselves changed a lot of minds.
jsfox
As one of those Vietnam era protesters I would like to think a lot, but reality forces me to say not much. I think Walter Cronkite had more to do with it than thousands of anti-war protesters. As johnson said: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”
So in the end what did the anti-war movement accomplish . . . Nixon.
David in NY
I really think that the Vietnam-era protests in the context of a draft were a lot different from the Iraq war protests — much more visceral and likely to touch people, most of whom knew someone who had been drafted or was about to be. That was no volunteer army.
And I think drunken hausfrau put it well, the protests soured people on the war as it dragged on. As did its increasing cost and increasingly obvious futility.
trollhattan
@Anoniminous:
That was the basis of Nixon’s southern strategy, which we’re still dealing with today. I’ll also cite the Chicago convention and riots for putting the Democrats in the worst possible light in front of the country. Not to mention Humphrey was a horrible campaigner (H.S. Thompson had quite a bit to say about him).
bemused senior
The anti-war movement caused changes in the draft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States#Vietnam_War
Nixon was supported by anti-war protesters because of his promises to end the war and the draft. I give thanks that I was not yet 21 in 1968 or I might have a vote for Nixon on my conscience. I believe that the opposition to the Vietnam War would have been insignificant had there been no draft in place. Of course the ability to conduct the war in the way that it was would have been curtailed as well.
Tom Hilton
@artem1s:
This attitude is actually one of my primary gripes about OWS.
For fuck’s sake, results can’t possibly be “irrelevant” to protest. Treating them as irrelevant or secondary is a surefire way to make the protest itself (ultimately) irrelevant.
Mino
I think Johnson was sincere in trying ot negotiate that fall, but Kissinger ratfuc8ed the talks by promising the North better terms after the election. Where do you think Ronnie got his gameplan for Carter?
Of course, the North repeated the favor by leaking Kissinger’s perfidy. So, for that embarrassment they got another 6 yrs of war.
FlipYrWhig
How widespread was public support for Vietnam in the first place? Before anyone was protesting in the streets, I mean?
srv
The DFH’s didn’t end the war, but if they hadn’t been out there we’d probably still be there.
The freeze wasn’t started by hippies. The Euros did all that and the regular always anti-nuke crowd here joined in. It was too little to late to effect anything here (Jimmy Earl was responsible for all those programs, not Reagan), but it was good for greens in Europe. Was all about European politics than it was about security anyway.
These folks argue it impacted Reagan’s strategy, but even I’ll give Reagan the credit for seeing the opportunity he had with Gorbachev:
http://hnn.us/articles/1797.html
Nicole
I heard somewhere that it was the end of student deferments that really turned the tide. As soon as the rich and upper middle-class couldn’t tuck their sons safely away at college anymore, they became very anti-Vietnam.
One of the things that really stuck out to me in Nixonland (thanks again for the book club, Anne Laurie!) was that Nixon said that had GHW Bush kept the first Iraq war going through the 1992 election, he’d have won. Nixon commented on how that worked out well for him in 1972.
sublime33
Don’t understimate the fact that the anti-war protests galvanized a lot of support for Nixon, not unlike how FOX has galvanized support for Obama. I am 55 and my parents were Midwest Bob Dole type Republicans, not Reaganites or Tea Partiers. They viewed the protesters as either too lazy to work, unable to follow rules to hold a job, or too cowardly to fight for their country. I remember them turning on our porch light per Richard Nixon’s request as a symbol of “The Silent Majority”, then my older brother turning it off when they left the room. This repeated itself twice when I heard my dad say “Who keeps turning off the light? Knock it off!”
jsfox
@FlipYrWhig: Support was fairly strong.
http://www.seanet.com/~jimxc/Politics/Mistakes/Vietnam_support.html
geg6
@Tom Hilton:
Exactly. It’s why the Vietnam protests went exactly nowhere and influenced exactly no one. You’ve gotta have a goal. I support OWS but they are gonna have to eventually come up with something concrete or people will quit caring. Protest for the sake of protest is not a message, a course of action, or in any way inspiring.
Poopyman
@eemom:
I’ll suggest one. They both changed – or started to change – the conversation around the war/ the recession. I agree that the protests in the 60s had no affect on policy, but what was it that got Cronkite on the plane to Saigon?
Yeah, we got Nixon (and the ramora around him who resurfaced 25 years later). Unintended consequences can be a bitch.
MattF
It’s worth recalling that up to the ’60’s, Democrats were the War Party– Bob Dole’s old gibe about ‘Democrat Wars’ was at least halfway true. But the protests of the ’60’s turned the older Democrats around, at least to some degree, and also helped make the Republicans into the War Party. These sorts of changes didn’t make headlines, but they matter.
DougJ
@eemom:
I think you are right. I’ve been hearing the comparison a lot and I just don’t enough about the 60s to have an informed opinion.
So thanks to people for their input.
Percysowner
A coworker of mine was one of the students who was injured during the shooting. A bullet went through his hand. He ran a museum dedicated to the Kent State shooting. Governor Rhodes was in primary battle for another term. One week before the shootings polls had him 8% behind Robert Taft in that race. Governor Rhodes DID lose the primary battle, but instead of losing by 8% he lost by 3,000 ballets out of 900,000 cast.
Killing the DFHs was considered a GOOD thing. It is one of my real concerns about OWS. Historically these kind of protests end in violence and the protester are usually the ones who end up dead, while the people in power get patted on the back.
Egilsson
G & T
Well, I was one of 1,000,000+ people who went to NYC for a massive nuclear freeze rally in 1982. I believe it has the distinction for being one of the largest political rallies ever.
I’m glad to hear something positive did happen. It didn’t seem like it had much impact at the time, and then Mondale (who would have been a good president) got crushed by Reagan in 1984. Reagan *gained* power by campaigning against the peace movement with his “peace through strength” bumper sticker. They continually distorted what the protests were about and won by demonizing their distortion. Then the theme was the democratic party was hostage to the extremists and republicans were the adults. Things sure have changed.
This country went on the wrong track in a serious way then. Monied interests will prevail until driven to the table by mass movement. It’s one reason why I’m such much more pro-union now, despite some pretty obvious union warts. It’s the only way people who work will get more.
trollhattan
@srv:
Fuzzy memories but I think the nuclear disarmament movement began more in the beatnick era. Fun fact: the peace symbol is from semaphore letters “ND” for nuclear disarmament.
Whippersnappers should also note the ’72 election was the first for newly minted 18YO voters, in ’68 voting age was still 21 (when Cheney was busy harvesting all those draft deferments).
Michael
Those who suggest the peace demonstrations were made up of “hippies” need to do some homework. In November 1969, some 600,000 people protested the war, representing a wide cross-section of people.
Attitudes about the war also changed starting in 1969 with the start of the draft lottery, which increased the chances of more financially well-off young men getting conscripted.
Jay C
I’d have to say the the answer is both “yes” and “no” to your questions, DougJ: On one hand, the Anti-War Movement per se was notably ineffective: it was too easy to (more-or-less in order) ignore, marginalize, demonize, repress – and finally give grudging acknowledgment to. Off-the-record, of course, since even remotely admitting that DFH radical weirdos might be, or ever had been right about anything was simply too unacceptable for too many people to grasp(and still is: see the 2004 election, and the disgraceful treatment John Kerry got: mainly as – very much delayed – payback for his anti-war activism).
Mino
@FlipYrWhig: Johnson had a lot of support for just about anything he did for a long while. And Vietnam was mission creep on steroids. Remember, too, other stuff was making headlines, like civil rights and desegregation.
I remember 67-68 as when things really began going south. After Tet, it got pretty unpopular fast.
FlipYrWhig
@jsfox: Thx. I wonder, though, about the usual curve of support for foreign wars, and if Vietnam deviated from it. Because my gut reaction is that most wars start out with fairly high levels of support, and that support remains strong as long as it looks like the US is “winning,” but then support starts to taper off the longer the war lasts. There has pretty much never been a movement against the Afghanistan war, and support has ebbed away there too. So what I’m really curious about is how mass protest “adds value,” so to speak, when compared to a no-protest baseline.
Gin & Tonic
@Egilsson: I can’t recommend Rhodes’ book highly enough if you are interested in that aspect of history. It’s positively chilling to read how close we came to nuclear war in 1983 — more dangerous but less well-known that the Cuban missile crisis — and then how we got from there in a fairly short period to the Reagan-Gorbachev agreement.
wvblueguy
As a Vietnam Veteran who came home before TET and right after the Summer of Love in San Francisco, I would say that the protests played a significant part in changing the sentiment nation wide. I know exactly how I felt when I came home, and will state that my experience played a major part in my decision to get out of the service. I publicly supported an end to the war, and know that a lot of my fellow veterans felt the same way. If you were there when RFK was assassinated, LBJ decided not to run, and Richard Nixon won the election you probably felt like the bottom fell out of your world. There is no doubt in my mind that the American public realized that the protestors were not DFHs but folks just like them.
sublime33
@Michael: While I believe that there was a good cross section of people involved in the protests, there is a widely held perception that it was dominated by long haired hippies. And they still view anti-war demonstrations as “hippie demonstrations” to this day. I was driving my father who was 76 through my nice suburban neighborhood around 2005 and one house had a “Stop the War” sign in their front yard. He asked “do hippies live there or something?” No, he is a real estate agent who does pretty well.
FlipYrWhig
@wvblueguy: But if the American public was so sympathetic, why did they elect Nixon — and overwhelmingly at that?
techno
I was there. I went to several of the big marches. It felt like a giant waste of time. And as far as I am concerned, the only activists who actually changed anything were the folks who ran the coffeehouses next to the military bases. The war ended when the military-industrial complex could no longer trust its foot soldiers. The movie Sir, No Sir from 2005 tells the story pretty accurately.
danimal
I’m amazed at the attention OWS is getting on the right-wing wurlitzer. The attention is mostly negative, but the stunning part to me is that they haven’t a clue how to shoehorn the protestors into one of their demonized groups. Oh, they’re trying, but they can’t seem to agree on a narrative.
The RW wurlitzer is a sight to behold when they can’t get on message. BTW, all they are talking about is economic inequality. It’s taking a lot of energy away from Obama-bashing, promoting austerity, distracting social issues, etc. OWS is moving the Overton Window, whatever that is.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
THat would be fun. I despise that little troll. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a primary for that loathsome old Blue Dog Dianne Antionette.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@Michael:
As it was then, so it is today: It doesn’t matter if they’re real, honest to god Hippies or not. As long as you can say they’re “Hippies”, they must be so, and thus must be shunned by the majority of America if they wanna be real Americans, because EVERY SINGLE REAL GOD-FEARING AMERICAN HATES HIPPIES JUST LIKE JESUS COMMANDS.
That’s the whole point of hippie punching. You don’t punch actual hippies. You designate people further to the right of the real deal as ‘Hippies’, punch THEM, and voila, everyone to the left of your new Hippie yardstick is an even worse hippie. Congratulations, you just made a significant section of the political sphere absolutely toxic by hippie punching!!!
FlipYrWhig
It seems to me that a big part of the antiwar protests, and the ’60s counterculture in general, was to galvanize the understanding that there was, in fact, another way; that strange, scary shit was happening and not a lot that could be done about it that was constructive, except to try to make friends with other people who felt similarly. So did the protesters themselves stop the war? IMHO, hardly. But they certainly did make more protesters, and that’s worth something too.
Ruckus
@bemused senior:
@Nicole:
I believe the draft played a much larger role in ending Vietnam than protesters. And it was a lot due to deferments running out and the draft lottery. All of a sudden people who had been staying out no longer could. I’ve wondered before how many Phd’s there are that never would have been earned if not for the war.
The protesters did put the issues in front of people who never would have thought about them and that ain’t nothing. That’s what peaceful protests do, expose the issues to people that would not see them otherwise.
trollhattan
@FlipYrWhig:
Vietnam’s vast death and injury toll, coupled with the draft, ensured most Americans either knew somebody fighting there, killed or maimed there, or about to be drafted and shipped over there. Vastly different from the “sanitary” nature our Middle East and South Asian entanglements today.
Combat operations and the latest death toll lead the nightly news, daily, in a time the nightly news meant something. Every American high school had graduates (and dropouts) serving there; far too many had graduates killed there.
Gin & Tonic
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, I mainly thought of the protests as a good way to meet chicks, too. Oh wait, was that what you meant?
Tom Hilton
@geg6: Rick Perlstein has a very smart piece along those lines. I read it and was encouraged (as I always am when I see that somebody really gets it)…then I read the comments there and wanted to slit my wrists. “What has voting every accomplished? We voted for Obama and he SOLD US OUT! Dude, it’s not about politics, it’s a movement.” Etc., etc., etc.
trollhattan
@FlipYrWhig:
I suspect quite a bit of it had to do with him being the “lawn order” candidate. If all politics is local, crime held a lot of sway over voters’ attention.
Also, too, the cold war was still in scary full swing, Nixon had “opened” China, and we’d just experienced the Munich Olympics massacre. The world was a scary place and McGovern was only just a decorated bomber pilot. (Optics–how the f*$k do they work?)
John Weiss
@The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik: That’s crap! The Hippies were right for all the right reasons! Make love, not war! What the hell is wrong about that?
Ruckus
@FlipYrWhig:
Why did they elect Nixon?
1. For a change? Johnson was the war president, Nixon said no.
2. We were stupid? We saw the elephant in the room, the war, didn’t see the elephant on the horizon, the gop.
FlipYrWhig
@Ruckus: @trollhattan: I guess that makes sense… my parents were very antiwar and always loathed Nixon, but I suppose there were other permutations than that.
Linda Featheringill
Buffalo Springfield
Stop Children What’s That Sound
“getting so much resistance from behind”
My antiwar experiences were characterized by resistance and pushback from the local citizens around me, even more than from the police. You probably cannot imagine the hatred spewed upon us by people on the sidelines.
I don’t see this happening with OWS. Quite the contrary, I see a lot of support for the occupiers from the general population.
Does someone disagree?
Turgidson
@jsfox:
Also too, Nixon had his “secret plan” to end the war, that we only got to benefit from if he was elected. Different versions of that little rope a dope lie have been trotted out numerous times since, most recently by Lieberman in ’06 (paraphrasing his monstrous lie): “no one wants to end the Iraq War more than I do”, and McCain ’08 “I know how to win in Afghanistan but I’m not telling.”
Sasha
Generally, not taken too seriously until people in suits (i.e., everyday Americans) started joining in and being visible in the protests. Then it became clear that this wasn’t a fringe movement, but a truly popular uprising.
Origuy
@FlipYrWhig: Nixon was the “peace” candidate in the general election. Humphrey, as Johnson’s VP, couldn’t openly speak out against the war. After RFK was killed, his delegates split between Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy; had they all gone to McCarthy, Clean Gene would have been the nominee. The election was far from overwhelming, with Nixon getting 43.4% of the popular vote to Hubert’s 42.7% and George Wallace’s 13.5%.
It’s hard to say how the election would have been different without Wallace; that was before the Southern Strategy got southerners to leave the Democratic Party in large numbers.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Tom Hilton: It’s so damn frustrating. The right gets mad and surges to the polls, the left gets mad and disengages.
eemom
Not to denigrate the study of history, but I don’t understand why people spend so much effort and energy in trying to analogize current situations with the past. Context is everything. The country is a different place today than it was 45 years ago in countless, infinite ways.
A lot of the attitudes people are mentioning here as reasons why the Vietnam protests backfired just are not relevant anymore. It seems to me, for example, that the republitards have gotten nowhere trying to smear the OWS protesters as lazy, dirty “hippies” who won’t get a job. That’s because everybody knows there ARE no jobs. The movement keeps gaining momentum because its message totally resonates with people in the country as it exists TODAY.
This is also why it drives me crazy when people take it as a given that Obama can’t be reelected if the economy still sucks, again based on nothing more than meaningless statistics from past elections in bygone eras.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@John Weiss:
That’s beca-SHUT THE FUCK UP HIPPIE, AND GET YOUR PATCHOULI-SMELLING ASS OUT OF MY FUCKING YARD!!!
(But seriously, the whole point is that being right is not a virtue for the village or the VSPs, if they determine you were right for all the wrong reasons. However, if you were wrong, but for all the right reasons, you’re a giant fucking hero rewarded with a weekly slot on the Sunday shows. Look at the Iraq War, especially right at the start, and near the end of W’s term)
geg6
@trollhattan:
You’re talking about the ’72 election. In ’68, Nixon was running around telling John Q. Public that he had a secret plan to end the war. I know people who were anti-war who voted for him based on that very thing. He was able to convince people of that because the DFHs (really, the cops) rioted in Chicago over war-monger Humphrey getting the Dem nomination (not really, but this is what many thought). And at that point, it was the Dems who were considered the war party.
patrick II
I think the causal relationship is the other way around. Public sentiment against the war had been there and caused the protests. People forget that Johnson campaigned against the war. LBJ told us he didn’t want to send American boys to fight the battles Asian boys should be fighting for themselves. He lied, ginned up the Gulf of Tonkin incident and expanded the war.
In the next election the peace candidate who would have won — Bobby Kennedy — was assassinated. Humphrey took the nomination and lost election to Nixon because he had been associated with LBJ and the war as vice-president. He couldn’t make people believe he would end it fast enough, and he was was up against another liar — Richard Nixon — who promised he had a ‘secret plan’ to end the war. Once again people voted for someone to end the war, and once again, in a real failure of democracy, politicians who “knew better” than the people who voted for them thwarted their wishes. Nixon’s “secret plan” turned out to be expansion of the war into Laos and Combodia, and even considering use of the atomic bomb.
So the demonstrations became more virulant because it was as clear as it has ever been that voting meant nothing, What politicians said they would do meant nothing. They still took young people with the draft and gave them back in wooden boxes. Three of my high school classmates came in those boxes.
By Nixon’s second campagin the demonstrations had cloven people into two frustrated, angry camps. The law and order camp re-elected Nixon but those against the war as exmplified by the demonstrators, finally got through to the democrats in congress who stopped financing the war and so it finally ended.
Or at least that is how I remember it.
mcd410x
This is the craziest thing I’ve seen lately. Headline: “Are your children safe?”
Local TV anchor wants to teach children how to fight back if a gunman enters the school.
Wait, if all the kids are armed, this can’t happen, right?
PurpleGirl
Kent State: As many people said the students deserved being shot as people were horrified by it.
I remember it very well, it happened during my second Freshman term at NYU (May 1970). I was still a chemistry major and the chem department was talking to us about grade options if NYU closed in response to student strikes. I remember hearing members of construction unions being interviewed on TV about it. Remember the construction union member were very vocal about the student strikes at Columbia University and were generally not supportive of the students.
Tom Hilton
@geg6: I was actually in Chicago at the time. 7 years old, on family vacation; near downtown we got turned back by the National Guard, who were telling people to stay away from the area. I remember watching the news on the motel tv that night.
Bill Section 147
Demonstrations kept the discussion in the news so I think they served to remind people that not everybody was complacent.
How many people really could have witnessed a demonstration for themselves though? For almost everyone it was a television experience at most. And the media wasn’t on the DFH side.
If you were ever in one or near one where the cops beat some heads you realized that the ‘story’ on the news was bull. I only had one experience but it was scary when the tear gas went off. So for people who were actually there it really changed your perception of the media.
sublime33
@PurpleGirl: “the construction union member were very vocal about the student strikes at Columbia University and were generally not supportive of the students.” This is like saying Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are generally not supportive of Barack Obama.
Kay Shawn
With a brother in ‘Nam and a sister at Kent State, I for one, was well aware of the mostly futile protest movement, but it felt good to know we weren’t alone. [Anyone else remember this ditty: “Why change dicks in the middle of a screw, Vote for Nixon in ’72!”]
walden
Antiwar protests led to two things:
1. Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the war, got him elected in 1968. (Turned out his secret plan was to bomb Cambodia)
2. Nixon needed to do something for 1972, so he ended the draft. The end of the draft, in turn, made sustaining the war untenable…and he, like Johnson, had begun to realize it was a millstone around his administration.
Also, it wasn’t just Cronkite — in fact the Smothers Brothers routinely mocked the war on network TV, and you could hear antiwar ballads and skits… Hard to imagine this happening on CBS today (let alone any other major network).
Keith G
@geg6:
I have different view.
I suppose that there are protests that have been rolled out like some corporate branding campaign – with a fully realized beginning, middle and end. I just do not think there is a world where that happens all that often.
If OWS had waited for a magical messaging pony to show up (or had listened to Cole and many others here during there first week), we might still be waiting – and look how much good they have accomplished.
No, the anti war protests were very successful because they showed people like me that there was an alternative way to view the war, that I did not have to feel the same way that my parents did. That, my friend, is some powerful shit.
Some ideas take time to be realized, but that does not mean that they do not have a big impact.
Protest for the sake of protest can a do important things, but that is not a truthful way to characterize OWS.
trollhattan
@geg6:
Right, I was referencing ’72 because I took the earlier comment’s “overwhelmingly” to mean the landslide against McGovern. Nixon beat Humphrey by less than a million votes, although he whipped him in the electoral count. It would be interesting to know where Wallace’s ten million votes would have gone, had he not been running.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Not a word about the VVAW. I don’t give a fuck if any of you think we had an impact or not. We did.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation and the end of the war.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
From “The Turning”
Jewish Steel
My understanding is we got out of Viet Nam for reasons relating to Charlie squatting in the bush and getting stronger while every minute we stayed in that room we got weaker. That’s how I heard it, at least.
@eemom:
Seriously, dude. Talk about your small sample sizes.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Jewish Steel: We watched “The Year of the Pig” last night ( my wife has not much of a clue about the war) and one of the State Dept officials recounted how Pham Van Dong asked him “How long to you want to stay 5, 10, 20 years? We’ll be here.”
Roy G.
@geg6, you’re on the money about the Iraq War protests – we marched in NYC, and the amount of people involved were amazing, crossing all socioeconomic lines. Unfortunately, like most parades it was forgotten the next day, helped along by a complicit media.
This is why I admire the OWS protestors, because they are walking the fine line and not just kowtowing to whatever ‘free speech zone’ bullcrap the Authorities are offering up as a sop. Civil disobedience gets their attention.
geg6
@Keith G:
I think the OWS protests have done a good thing in illustrating the amount of discontent among the populace. However, if it is going to become a “movement,” it has to figure out what it’s goals are. A lot of the stuff I’ve read about OWS from their own perspective references Ghandi, which is a great role model and all, but he had a goal and one that was simple for even the lowest castes of India to understand. In order for OWS to begin to be a real movement, they will eventually have to come up with something concrete that people can rally behind and that politicians can either support or fight against or people will simply stop paying attention.
So far, OWS has been spectacularly successful at metaphorically screaming “stop it!” at the top of their lungs. Eventually, people are going to want to know how to stop it and what comes after it stops. If all OWS does is keep screaming, people will stop listening.
honus
@bemused senior: Exactly. Nixon campaigned on his “secret plan” to end the war. Nixon was an anti-war candidate.
The joke is that more boys were killed in Vietnam after his election than before.
The idea that Kent State was the only effective anti-war protest is also wrong. It’s just the one most people remember. The movement was well along by then. As noted above, by 1968 (Tet and Cronkite) anti-war sentiment was pervasive. McCarthy beat LBJ in the NH primary largely by being anti-war. After seeing that, RFK adopted an anti-war stance.
War protests obviously didn’t end the war. But they turned the public against the war, or at least made it evident that there was a lot of anti-war sentiment out there. The Iraq protesters, in contrast, were much more successfully marginalized.
sam
@geg6:
“Exactly. It’s why the Vietnam protests went exactly nowhere and influenced exactly no one. You’ve gotta have a goal.”
I remember sitting in a bar in Cambridge watching an antiwar march come up Mass Ave. In the front of the march, just like a drum major, was this little angelic, blond girl. She couldn’t have been more than 17 or 18, about 5-1 or 5-2. She was carrying a big sign that said, “Get the Fuck Out”.
That was pretty much the goal, as I recall.
Joel
@FlipYrWhig: I reckon public sentiment was more complicated than people are making them here.
Beauzeaux
@FlipYrWhig:
Well, I was there. I didn’t see EVERYTHING but I was a participant in many, many anti-war demonstrations — local and national.
Most people supported the war. I remember catching lots of flak from my working class family. (Who now not only say I was right but also somehow remember that they were against the war too.)
When a million people marched on Washington (April 1970) the Nixon White House said he was watching football and paid no attention. We now know from the Watergate tapes that Nixon was shitting himself over the size of the march.
Understand that people in power always SAY they’re not intimidated by demonstrations but that doesn’t make it true.
I make no comparisons with OWS. But people who say the anti-war movement had no effect are just ignorant. The people in power DO NOT LIKE demonstrations that are very large and not under their control. Johnson/Nixon did everything they could to discredit and cripple the anti-war movement. Spies, provocateurs, “black bag jobs” and so forth. Many forces combined to force the end of the Vietnam incursion — the draft, revulsion at the casualties both military and civilian, cost, international opinion — all of which came to the attention of the general public courtesy of the anti-war movement and contributed to the unpopularity of the war.
Keith G
@geg6: I see your point but
Are these kids supposed to put away the tents and then begin doing what? Developing complicated banking policy? Negotiating international trade policy? Run for office?
These kids are tackling a specific job with a specific skill set. I am not sure there can be much transference
That is your job. It is my job. We have to be willing to take the baton. Are you game?
mary
I agree with Patrick II. Nixon was elected in 1968 by saying he would end the war. Poor Humphrey was left to defend Johnson administration’s actions. Also, between the race riots, the assasinations, George Wallace and the war demonstrations, Nixon promised that the ‘Silent Majority’ would be heard. Looking back, you really can’t underestimate the chaos of the late 1960’s. Also, there were a lot of working class parents who weren’t verbal but were also determined that their boy wouldn’t go to Vietnam. It was a quiet ongoing conversation in my extended family.
Kola Noscopy
DougJ, this is one of your apparently patented “gee, duh…I don’t know…” posts, in which rather than do some research and find out a perfectly researchable topic to come up with a possible answer, you pretend to seek the questionable wisdom of the BJ commentariat as a shameless…troll for hits? Hell, I don’t know your purpose, but it makes you look stupid.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Beauzeaux: That was October, there’s no football in April. Nixon walked around the Washington Monument and talked to students about football games.
eemom
@Keith G:
From Lemony Snicket’s 13 Observations on OWS:
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@mary: Yep. I came home and was told by a friends parents
1. You have no business protesting the war whether you were in it or not.
2. Our sons are not going to that shit.
I swear to god.
Chris
@Beauzeaux:
And that’s why OWS has them shitting their pants. The MOTU control and own the Republican Party lock stock and barrel, have the Democratic Party very well penetrated at the very least, and virtually astroturfed the Tea Party Movement into existence a couple years ago.
Toss in the corporate-owned media for good measure. The MOTU are quite used to controlling politics and the national discourse at every level, so when something pops up that they didn’t create and don’t control, they absolutely freak the fuck out. And OWS is the first such movement they’ve seen in a while.
The Moar You Know
America turned on their teevees and saw a bunch of stoned, filthy, foul-mouthed, race-mixing, longhair scumbags chanting that the war sucked. This crew of malodorous idiots and never-do-wells were, in fact, stone cold right about that. But the America of the day – an America so profoundly different from the one we have now that I often feel as though the past is truly a distant country – didn’t realize that looks weren’t important, what mattered was not the messenger but the message, and they freaked the fuck out.
Middle America, who before had been starting to figure out the war was not really the best idea nor in any way in their best interests, upon sighting this crew of angry kids that resembled at first glance nothing so much as a million-plus horde of Barbary pirates, pissed their collective pants, threw up in revulsion, and fled in droves towards conservatism, that bastard Nixon, and his handpicked squad of Nazis. Yeah, I used “Nazis”, and no, I’ll never apologize because that’s what they were.
There’s no case that can be made that the protests shortened the war, or did anything to galvanize public opinion against it. In fact, quite the opposite.
I love my hippie brethren to this day, but the brutal truth is that we did it 100% wrong and there is no taking that back.
EDIT: Credit where credit is due. One man did more than anyone else to stop the madness, and that was Walter Cronkite.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@The Moar You Know: Just fuck you.
Except for the hair you are talking about the troops,:
“stoned, filthy, foul-mouthed, race-mixing, longhair scumbags chanting that the war sucked”
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
There’s no case that can be made that the protests shortened the war,
and there is no case that can be made that they didn’t.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
Jim Webb will tell you that the anti-war movement cause the war to go on longer and cost more lives. The logical extension of that is that if there had been no resistance the government would have been free to kill enough of them to get them to surrender.
Rick Perlstein
Best thing I ever heard said about this question was not that the protests ended the Vietnam War, but that there prevented there from being six Vietnam Wars. As a historian of this stuff, that rings true to me.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Rick Perlstein: Hey Rick, you and I chatted before I got banned from FDL. I was amazed that you knew about the minutemen sending postcards to activists in Champaign. I know you discussed Dewey Canyon III and the VVAW quite a bit in Nixonland and I was surprised to see no one had even mentioned it until I showed up late in the thread.
General Stuck
Too many body bags for too long is what ended the Vietnam War past the point where national pride ruled the roost. And the fact that the soldiers inside them came from all walks of American life, most of which conscripted.
The voting patterns of those years were directed by neurotic passive aggressive lurches from the WW2 middle classers (silent majority). At once, seeing their country’s government lying to them wholesale, and fearing nekkid hippies fornicating on their front lawn. The war protests were just a stage for all of that/imo, experienced myself, through The Mary Jane Looking Glass
The Moar You Know
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Somebody’s a little sensitive. Dig deep. The war was a failure. The protests were an equal failure. Get over it, and get over yourself.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@The Moar You Know: I repeat, just fuck you.
Chris
@Rick Perlstein:
I agree with this. Without the Vietnam controversy, you’d have had American troops fighting more Vietnams in several Central American nations throughout the eighties.
On the other hand, Iran-contra did maintain several aspects of our Southeast Asia campaign. If memory serves, the concept of turning hired thugs, mercenaries and drug dealers into CIA-backed private armies was already explored in the Vietnam era as well.
jefft452
@Tom Hilton:
“…Treating them as irrelevant or secondary is a surefire way to make the protest itself (ultimately) irrelevant.”
Disagree
When a guy stands up on a soapbox and yells “Down with the King!”, the King aint in trouble
When the crowd responds with cheers, the king has a problem
Even if the guy on the soapbox gets tossed in the deepest dungeon where nobody can hear him, the sentiment of the public dosent just go away
“They may forget the singer, They will not forget the song”
PanurgeATL
@The Moar You Know:
Don’t sell yourself so short. There’ve been good points made here that the protests did do some good, along with everything else–and besides, I wouldn’t be who I am if not for the hippie movement, TYVM (even though I do no drugs and don’t even drink much).
Hippie-punching in the wake of the rise of punk has become a pastime for the left, too, which only abets the conservative narrative (why no one seems to get this I have less than no idea). Maybe we need better hippies?? (Why no one seems to formulate the issue that way I also have less than no idea.)
Vickie Feminist
@FlipYrWhig: VIetNam was classic “mission creep.” First we were going to just advise and then they needed a bit more help to stop the encroaching of the communist North Vietnamese, etc. etc. etc and you have 50,000 dead. We were helping our friends who were newly freed from French imperialism–it seemed like a good idea at the time. THE beginning was very different than Iraq–there was no widespread anti-war movement during JFK’s presidency. And yes the draft supercharged the anti-war effort. And when the lottry kiickekd in and we women saw how many young men stopped demonstrating we got together and started a women’s liberation movement. (Also the CHicago cops beat the s–t out of people, incluidng elderly women, during a huge Easter 1968 anti-war march which shocked people then they beat up the kids during the Democratic Convention and that shocked people.)
Tom
F*ck yeah, Repo Man.
Skippy the Wondermule
Whenever anyone asks what OWS is about, give them a verse from America the Beautiful. Everyone can write their own, here’s mine:
Oh beautiful for empty streets, for prisons filled with poor,
For children trapped in poverty, and never-ending war!
America, America, your dream won’t die with me,
We’ll sit and wait, preach love, not hate. One day the world will see.
loggerman
I am a Nam vet, served in 68 during the TET, MLK AND RFK assinations. I have a hard time believing most of these comments. The protests (which I later joined) were the most significant factor in ending that war. When they started they were exclusively HIPPIE. In a short period of time a cross section of America was participating. The OWS reminds me so much of that time. Keep up the great work.
Zak
I was in college when the Bay of Tonkin resolution, which authorized the escalation of the war, was passed—so I was in the thick of it. I, and most of my friends (some of whom became pretty radical), saw no justification for the war nor any reason to fight in it, but the point became moot for me when I was drafted. As a result, I was able to look at the years of protest from both sides.
My feeling has always been that the protests actually prolonged the war. Why? Because so much of the counterculture was aimed at shocking and offending average Americans–the very people the protesters needed on their side to generate real political pressure. Marching with NLF flags and chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, Ho Chi Minh is gonna win” is not a tactic calculated to win over middle class Americans. Sure, the the people who went in for stunts like this were a small minority, but they were very effective in making themselves the face of protest. And at a time when the sons of average Americans were coming home in metal caskets, it was easy to make ALL opposition look unpatriotic and unAmerican.
I might add that the moral pretensions of many of the protestors didn’t help. Those of us who served, did alternate service as conscientious objectors, or left the country without hope of ever coming back all confronted harder moral decisions than those who pulled strings, faked disqualifying mental and physical problems, or (like GW Bush), used privileged connections to avoid active duty. Of course, that didn’t stop many of them from condemning others. The true depth of their convictions was revealed when the draft was ended and opposition to the war—which was continuing as immorally as ever—quickly withered away.
PanurgeATL
But I thought the draft wasn’t ended until after the ’73 cease-fire was signed?
Zak
You’re right about the date the draft ended. But once it did, so did any kind of large-scale activism for social or political change, to be replaced by what…disco?
I stand by my major point: that the co-option of the antiwar movement by people who were seen by the larger public as allies of the “enemy” and contemptuous of American values had the effect of hardening support for the war. That support only began to erode after the shock of the Tet Offensive, which belied the steady diet of optimistic reports and forecasts that the government had been feeding the American public.
Tom Hilton
@jefft452: Okay, now I get it. I see the wisdom of what you’re saying.
It works like this: if you decide Step 3 (“Profit!”) is irrelevant, then you don’t need to have a Step 2 (“???”)–which makes your whole plan a lot more plausible.
Did I say “wisdom”? I meant genius. Pure motherfucking genius.