(In The Long Term View, "Legacies of Vietnam" issue, Volume 5, Number 1)
 

In a recent diatribe, Adam Garfinkle, author of a critical book on the Vietnam-era Peace Movement (Telltale Hearts, 1995) unleashed a verbal blitzkrieg against the antiwar movement of the 1960s.  The protests, he contends, actually "lengthened the war and . . . more people were killed on account of them."  Why is that so?  Garfinkle tells us, or at least tries: "the obscenity, illegality, and raging anti-patriotism of the antiwar protestors made them the most hated group in America during the late 1960s and early 1970s."  The movement provoked a backlash, Garfinkle assures us, that provoked a militant black power movement, gave George Wallace the credibility to become a mainstream candidate, prevented Hubert Humphrey from being elected in 1968, and actually elected Richard Nixon to the White House twice.  Do Mulder and Scully know about all this?

I wish we could give Garfinkle's ideas the summary dismissal they so richly deserve, but, alas, there are others who feel likewise, and they hold political office, have radio programs, and "teach" young students their own sordid versions of this history.  These conservative and reactionary revisionists, by focusing on the movement against the war and holding it responsible for the horrors of Vietnam, offer an ahistorical and chauvinistic, not to mention amoral, view of the whole period.  They ignore the context of Vietnam, in which the United States, as it did so often in the Cold War era, violently intervened against a nationalist-Socialist movement that had the temerity to question Washington's hegemony.   Their work absolves the American leaders, from Roosevelt  to Nixon, who made the critical decisions to deny self-determination to the Vietnamese and  stole independence and unification from them in 1946 and 1954, who created a fictive puppet state in 1956, who waged a destructive war against the people of Indochina, who lied to the American people, who usurped power in the name of national security, who rejected democracy at home and abroad, and instead blames protestors for  the death and mayhem.  These revisionists also assume that the war was noble and somehow could have succeeded (Garfinkle would have done well to look at my book Masters of War, which demonstrates just how deeply reluctant and opposed to involvement in Vietnam most military leaders were in the 1950s and 1960s, and points out the unwinnability of the war there).  They present--no surprise here--a monolithic view of the movement against the war that makes no distinction between the Weathermen, Joan Baez, Gold Star Mothers, Senators Frank Church or John Stennis, General Matthew Ridgway, the Berrigans, housewives, ministers or soldiers; all, we are told, were engaged in actions that were obscene, illegal and anti-patriotic.    In the end, though, Garfinkle's views consist precisely of the words he uses to deride the movement–ego and pure wind.  It is not history.

 The Peace Movement of the 1960s constituted the largest mass people's movement in U.S. history.  It cut across lines of class, race, sex, religion, and other social characteristics.   It forced the American people to confront, morally and practically, their government's role in the world and specifically its behavior in Vietnam.  It offered a systemic analysis of the antidemocratic nature of American politics and economy based on the concept of corporate liberalism, an outlook that helped shake the foundations of the system in 1968 and after.  The Movement led to demands for accountability from political leaders and a general distrust of authority,  calls for popular empowerment and participatory democracy.  It forced the media to report more truthfully and critically about an American war than it ever had before.  It changed the American political landscape, providing the space for figures such as Senators Frank Church and George McGovern, or Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, to speak out against the war.  It gave rise to larger oppositional forces that would create a counterculture since, young people in the 1960s reasoned, the individuals and the system which unleashed war in Vietnam could probably not be trusted to tend to society at home. And, most importantly for my purposes here, it has provided millions of activists with a legacy and a model for protests that has fueled social movements over the past three decades.  The movement against the Vietnam War should be celebrated and emulated.  Say it loud: I marched and I'm proud!

Vietnam and the Movements of the Sixties

The Vietnam antiwar movement emerged during a volatile social period, as Blacks, students, women, environmentalists, Chicanos, Gays, and other groups were also demanding political rights and civil equality.  But Vietnam came to dominate the movements of the 1960s, variously overriding, coopting, changing or spinning off new movements in the process.  Whereas the early 1960s were a time of great hope, as a grassroots and sometimes interracial Civil Rights Movement was dismantling southern apartheid, the war came to dominate the political and social landscape of the United States from mid-decade forward.  In 1963, for instance, well over half the general public identified Civil Rights as "the most important problem confronting the country."  By 1966, however, nearly 60 percent now identified Vietnam as America's most urgent problem, while Civil Rights had dropped to third in priorities, with under 10 percent identifying it as the America's paramount concern.

At the same time, the Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement had begun to challenge the mainstream political structure.  Inspired by the work of the Sociologist  C. Wright Mills and scholars associated with the journal Studies on the Left, these college students and their allies, known collectively as the New Left, offered a sharp challenge to the traditional, liberal, political system.  They derided the emergence of bureaucracies on campus and in society generally; they attacked the "multiversity"–the relationship between higher education, corporations, and the military establishment; and most importantly they demanded a new type of politics, "participatory democracy."  To the New Left, U.S. democracy had become stagnant, with politicians, corporations and even organized labor making policies without any real input at the grassroots level.  So, using SDS's phrase, this cadre of activists called for a "participatory" political system, one in which power would be decentralized and individuals would have an effective role in making the decisions which governed society.  Toward that end, SDS and other New Left groups began working with Civil Rights groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] and hoped to build an "interracial movement of the poor" to organize tenants' unions, voter registration drives, welfare rights organizations and other reform movements.   Like the Civil Rights Movement, however, the New Left had to confront the emergence of the war.  First subordinating and then abandoning projects committed to creating a participatory system, the New Left became essentially an antiwar group.  As Martin Luther King would later charge, dreams of creating a "great society" at home had died on the battlefields of Vietnam.

As the decade advanced, and as the war against Vietnam expanded, both the Civil Rights and New Left movements increasingly dedicated their efforts to stopping the war in Vietnam.  This obscene, illegal, and anti-American movement–as Adam Garfinkle and others would have it–encompassed a vast cross section of American society.  While the movement had a few extremists, like the Weather Underground bombers, and it share of political jesters, especially the delightful Abbie Hoffman, it was indeed a mainstream movement that included millions of Americans from all occupations and communities.  While the general public may have been turned off by the activities of groups perceived as  extremists, thus leading to polling data that suggested the movement was unpopular, many millions actually participated in antiwar protests during the Vietnam era.  In fact, the largest demonstrations, the Moratorium and the Mobilization to End the War, both in late 1969, involved well over a million people each in actions all over the United States.

Questioning Authority

 Obviously, America's past is full of examples of people's movements which challenged political and economic power, with various levels of success.  The 1960s was not the first period in which Americans protested their government's actions, but it was the most extended, in terms of time and issues covered, protest era in U.S. history.  Prior to the movements of the 1960s, Americans generally trusted their national leaders and supported their government's policies, both abroad and domestically.  The general public went along, for the most part, with McCarthyite purges, supported American interventions in the Third World, and believed that U.S. politicians and businessmen were concerned, to an extent at least, with the public good.  Vietnam changed that situation, at times dramatically.

American Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson made the initial U.S. commitments to Vietnam without much fanfare; in fact, most Americans knew little of Vietnam and the war was not a national concern, especially amid a series of Civil Rights crises in the early 1960s.  But, with the major American commitments of troops and money to Vietnam beginning in 1965, the public began to take notice.  SDS and other campus activists began organizing antiwar rallies and "teach-ins" against the growing American involvement in Vietnam.  Scholars and ministers began to speak out against the war.  Soon, soldiers and "mainstream" Americans were part of the protest movement.  Raised in a society that expected loyalty to and respect for authority, millions of Americans were now questioning the very system in which they had been raised.

Though  attacked by the media as unpatriotic and often told to love America or leave it, the movement against the war grew.  Building on the work of Civil Rights workers and activists for participatory democracy, the antiwar movement offered a synthetic analysis of American life.  Having witnessed horrific scenes of troopers and firemen attacking schoolchildren with German Shepherds and firehoses in Alabama, as well as images of bonzes burning themselves and villages being destroyed in Vietnam, activists believed that political leaders deserved closer scrutiny, and condemnation, at all levels.  They expected, indeed demanded, government accountability.  While it may have been insensitive to chant "hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" it was an attempt to force the president to accept ultimate responsibility for the decisions he had made.  No longer would the general public simply accept the idea that its leaders were wise and prudent men acting in the best humanitarian interests of the American people.  There was a "credibility gap" that grew daily.  The government, on a daily basis, had been lying to its citizens.  By 1968, amid the Tet Offensive, an all-out enemy offensive waged just weeks after American leaders has assured the nation that the war was going well, even the mainstream media had to expose the pattern of government deceit on Vietnam.  The national mood had shifted and Americans had developed a distrust of government, one that has continued and grown into the 21st Century.

Antiwar activists, and other demonstrators of the era, effectively made the point that equality, liberty, or justice were not attainable unless decision making was democratized.  Protestors against the war called for a fundamental restructuring and decentralization of political and economic institutions.  Rarely had Americans been confronted so starkly with a national debate over the meaning and practice of democracy.  Moving beyond the simple platitudes one would find in a Civics textbook, or the idea that democracy simply meant the right to vote and be represented, a mass of protestors challenged one of the fundamental bases of state power–its ability to draft young men and send them to fight a war in a faraway place.  Such concepts of democracy and challenges to government power have become a hallmark of the political system, on both the Left and Right, since that time.

The Sixties Generation: Activists or Sellouts?

 The 1960s hippie who turns into the 1980s yuppie has become a popular cultural stereotype.  Jerry Rubin, a founder of the Yippies, became a stockbroker later in life; David Horowitz, Ronald Radosh, Todd Gitlin and other "radicals" from the Vietnam era, to varying degrees, renounced their pasts and have become increasingly conservative as the years go by; films such as "The Big Chill" and television programs like "Family Ties" or "Dharma and Greg" portray activists as silly or sellouts.  Protestors from the sixties, one journalist wrote in 1982, "work on Wall Street these days, their inverted Y in a circle peace symbol . . . now a status symbol adorning the hoods of their Mercedes Benzes."  Such caricatures, quite popular in Hollywood and in Ronald Reagan's America in the 1980s, do not reflect the typical evolution of activists from the previous generation, however.  As Jack Whalen and Richard Flacks, activists and scholars who surveyed the life paths of 1960s activists into the 1980s, discovered, the portrayal of radicals who sold out was "inadequate . . . for the vast majority of former student activists." The best known example may have been Abbie Hoffman, antiwar activist and "court jester" of the Movement.  Hoffman went underground in the 1970s to avoid arrest on drug charges, assumed a new identity, and became an environmental activist.  After surfacing in the early 1980s, until he committed suicide in 1989 after years of manic-depressive disorders, Hoffman was a whirlwind of activism, remaining loyal to the ideals of the 1960s Movement.  "Revolution," he believed, " is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."  Whether organizing students to protest CIA recruitment on campus, attacking the Reagan administration's various interventions in Latin America, or deriding the increasing use of drug testing and other intrusions into personal privacy, Hoffman remained true to those words throughout his life, turning his activism into a "perpetual process."

Other national figures from the 1960s likewise continued to work for peace, justice, and democracy, including, to name just a few, Sandra "Casey" Hayden, Bobby Rush, Mary King, Tom Hayden, Kwame Ture (Stokeley Carmichael), Dave Dellinger, Cesar Chávez, Jesse Jackson, and Noam Chomsky.  Less well-known activists from earlier generations too continued to follow the principles of the Movement.  In studies of student protestors from the Santa Barbara and Berkeley campuses of the University of California system, it was evident that most activists had not "sold out."  A smaller percentage than "nonactivist" students hold jobs in the private sector, and they generally have smaller incomes.  Indeed, most research on former activists shows, as Flacks and Whalen explained, "that veterans of the sixties have tended to remain oriented in career and lifestyle to core values and perspectives that derive from movement and countercultural experience."

Warren Newhouser remained consistent, moving far from Santa Barbara and becoming an environmental activist in New England while living in a rural cabin without electricity.  Martha Koch, who became a doctor specializing in environmental and occupational health issues and was active in community politics, and Denise Saal, who worked as an assistant in a legal collective before attending Law School herself, and remained active as an advocate for Palestinian rights and in the Rainbow Coalition, likewise continued to uphold the principles of the 1960s.  Even more impressive, though, are the countless others whose names will never be well-known who gained their political awareness in the movement against the war and today are teachers, social workers, community activists, youth group volunteers and so on.  While the bizarre journey of those like David Horowitz from radical to Reagan reactionary may indeed be real, it is far from typical.

 Movements Since the Sixties

An even greater legacy than the activists who came of age during the antiwar movement and remained politically and socially involved is the connection between the sixties' generation and subsequent movements.  Well over the half of Americans involved in the anti-Reagan movements of the 1980s cut their political teeth in the anti-Vietnam War movement.  In a study of social movements since the 1960s edited by Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson, the historical strength of the antiwar and New Left movements is evident.  "Countercultural" movements and activists remained a vital part of oppositional politics; the practice of civil disobedience, epitomized by the Berrigans and others, was utilized in various protests against nuclear weapons, apartheid, or the World Trade Organization [WTO]; many of the tactics of the antiwar movement have been copied time and again, not only by progressive organizations but by reactionary groups such as Operation Rescue; affinity groups, similar to the consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s, are a trademark of political activism; and, regardless of age, sex, ethnic identification, or class,  demonstrators consistently point to the antiwar movement as an inspiration and model for their own political work.

This legacy has been evident throughout the post-Vietnam era.  A so-called Vietnam Syndrome has been cited repeatedly by the media and politicians to explain U.S. global policies since the 1970s.  While this concept is mythic in large measure–American militarism and aggression have not been mothballed at all,  just ask the Angolans, Guatemalans, Iraqis, Libyans, Nicaraguans, Panamanians Salvadorean and others attacked by U.S. weapons or American proxies–there is clearly a recognition among the general public that American soldiers should not be fighting in foreign lands.  So, although the legacy of Vietnam has not, despite protestations, forced American leaders to act with great restraint globally, it has provided activists with a model to challenge state actions.

In the major movements since Vietnam, the imagery and memory of that war were always evident.  Media reports about the nuclear freeze, pro-choice activities, the fight against apartheid in South Africa, the resistance to Reagan's wars in Central America or, most recently, the protests against globalization and the WTO make frequent reference to the Vietnam era.  This connection between the past, the 1960s, and a subsequent era, the 1980s, was nowhere more evident than in the movement against U.S. involvement in Central America.  Time and again activists as well as the general public linked Vietnam with El Salvador and Nicaragua.  Journalists often wrote of the possibility of a "Vietnam-style war" in the jungles of Latin America.  "Here we go again! Gulf of Tonkin day," warned one congress member amid a house debate on Central American policy.  Upwards of 70 percent of Americans opposed the deployment of American soldiers to Central America and similar numbers believed that events in that region could lead to "another Vietnam."  Perhaps this mood was best summed up by one of the more popular bumper stickers of the day: "El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam."

Currently, the legacy of the Vietnam era Peace Movement is again being revived.  As young activists, environmentalists, unions, and other groups have formed a mass movement against globalization, the 1960s has again become a pivot point for a political movement.  Young protestors, many not even born before the Vietnam War ended, are learning about that era, while veteran activists are able to apply the lessons they learned in an earlier generation.  In my own case, in the past twelve months I have conduced Vietnam-style "teach-ins" on Kosovo, Henry Kissinger, the WTO, and George Bush, and students asked questions about Vietnam during each of them.  As much as Adam Garfinkle and others might like to dismiss, discredit, and bury the activism of the antiwar movement, to substitute a Forrest Gump caricature in place of a reasoned analysis, it remains a shining example of democracy in the streets.  While the movement was far from perfect or sacred and was susceptible to excess, it was on the right side of history, morally and politically.  The only thing that is obscene, illegal, and anti-patriotic is the attempt, a quarter-century later, to deny its worth and suppress its memory.