The US anti-war movement: a cultural milestone
by William Ickes
A defining element in what Americans call the Vietnam War was a protest movement marked by personal sacrifice, rallies by hundreds of thousands of people and lasting, deep divisions.
With roots in the "Ban the Bomb" Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched in 1958 the peace symbol now recognized worldwide, a small movement grew into a force that helped shape US policy in Vietnam.
"In the course of the war, there developed in the United States the greatest anti-war movement the nation had ever experienced, a movement that played a critical role in bringing the war to an end," historian Howard Zinn wrote.
It was an amalgam of groups, from predominantly white college students to militant Black Panthers, from prominent clergy to anonymous atheists.
Together with the powerful civil rights movement, anti-war protests and media coverage of the war changed how the United States viewed itself.
One milestone came on April 4, 1967 when Nobel Peace Laureate Martin Luther King threw his weight behind the protests in a speech he gave "to break the silence."
King told a gathering in New York's Riverside Church: "If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read 'Vietnam'."
Eighteen months earlier, a Quaker named Norman Morrison had set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon, burning to death in a frightful mirror image of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc's suicide in Saigon.
US protests also included the practice of burning draft cards and the flight to Canada and Sweden of young men called into the army.
- Mass rally in Washington -
On November 15, 1969 a rally in Washington drew as many as a half million people, the biggest single demonstration against the war although others also numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
The movement was stoked by celebrities like boxing champion Mohammed Ali, actress Jane Fonda and celebrated paediatrician Benjamin Spock, rock stars, and landmark events on several continents.
Ali refused to be drafted into the army and was sentenced to a five-year term later reversed by the US Supreme Court.
In the background, from Motown hits by The Temptations like "War" to Bobby McGuire's sombre "Eve of Destruction", the airways echoed calls to end the fighting.
The media played a key role as well, with news and images that seared the conscience of a nation used to believing it stood for truth and justice.
The 1968 My Lai Massacre, napalm attacks starkly illustrated by a fleeing, naked nine-year-old girl named Phan Thi Kim Phuc, and the summary execution of a suspected Vietcong officer by police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan were heard of or seen around the world.
On May 4, 1970 four students were shot dead by US National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio.
- Losing 'Middle America' -
In February 1968 the widely respected CBS news anchorman Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam after covering the Tet Offensive and told the country: "It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."
After watching Cronkite's broadcast, US President Lyndon Johnson was quoted as saying: "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."
Later that year, anti-war riots outside the Democratic Party convention in Chicago led prime-time TV news broadcasts and King was killed in Memphis, a year to the day after his speech at Riverside Church.
Black ghettos in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington burst into flames and radicalized whites joined the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Youth International Party (Yippies).
Johnson had already decided not to seek another term.
Bob Dylan's prophetic 1964 ballad "The Times They are A-Changin'" proved true, Joan Baez intoned Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" and ex-Beatle John Lennon sang "Give Peace a Chance".
Johnson's successor Richard Nixon ended the draft in December 1972 and a month later the Paris Peace Accord ended US combat operations in Vietnam.
By then, however, the war and anti-war movement had "divided the American people as no other event since their own Civil War a century earlier," historian George Herring noted. "It battered their collective soul."