The Antiwar Movement in America's Universities
Amber Clapp

 
The antiwar movement of the Vietnam era changed over time.  The escalation of American involvement in Southeast Asia contributed to the transformation.  The movement started out as small and on primarily elite campuses.  It grew in size and influence as it gained membership on universities across the nation.  As time passed, the movement became more confrontational to achieve its idealistic goals.  The Johnson administration and its officials were visibly affected by this change of public sentiment.

Late 1964 and early 1965 proved disastrous for the unstable government of South Vietnam.  The National Liberation Front (NLF) had moved on the Bien Hoa airfield and Binh Gia.  The NLF obliterated the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), and a communist victory seemed a real possibility.  On February 6, 1965, NLF troops attacked the U.S. military advisers' compound at Pleiku.  Nine Americans were killed and over a hundred were wounded.  Many American officials urged President Lyndon Johnson to increase the number of troops in Vietnam, while others such as National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy became more and more distressed at the thought of increased U.S. involvement.  Bundy was in South Vietnam when the attack at Pleiku occurred.  Bundy revealed his feelings on the conflict in Vietnam in a memo he composed on his flight back to Washington:

The prospect in Vietnam is grim.  The energy and persistence of the Viet Cong are astonishing.  They can appear anywhere and at almost any time.  They have accepted extraordinary losses and they come back for more. . . .  At its very best, the struggle in Vietnam will be long.[1] 

Pleiku became the excuse Johnson needed to launch air strikes against North Vietnam.  On February 13, 1965, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder.  This program consisted of massive air strikes against North Vietnam.  Following the attack on Pleiku, the public supported Johnson's decision.  The administration called this attack a response to "aggression from the North."[2]  With a presidential approval rating of 83 percent, the public had obviously responded with the typical "rally around the flag effect."  This high approval rating would not last long. 
Late in February, General William Westmoreland requested 3,500 Marines to protect the U.S. air base at Danang.  President Johnson granted the request soon after. Marines landed in Danang, becoming the first ground forces in Vietnam early in March.  Additional requests were made for more troops in April of 1965.  Johnson first rejected an appeal for more than 100,000 men, but did agree to send 20,000.  Johnson secretly granted Westmoreland's request to allow the troops to engage in offensive operations rather then just guarding the bases.[3]  By the end of April, the administration agreed to send an additional 40,000 troops to prevent a defeat of the ARVN.  Johnson, with little explanation, asked Congress for $400 million to support increasing military operation.[4] 

The last six months of the year followed the trend of the first six months; more and more troops were being deployed to Vietnam.  Escalation of the war effort in 1965 brought not only a quantitative increase in the number of troops, but a qualitative expansion regarding the extent of the troops' actions. 

The Viet Cong defeated the ARVN in important battles in May and June of 1965.  As the conflict deteriorated rapidly, the Joint Chiefs, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other State Department officials urged Johnson to grant the military more resources, more men and more leeway.  In late July, Johnson authorized an increase in bombing in the South, further escalation of the air war in the North and deployed 50,000 men, while promising the Pentagon 50,000 more.  Before the end of the year, American combat strength had increased to nearly 200,000.  America's strategy had changed.  Instead of "assisting" the South Vietnamese and securing their bases, American troops were involved in aggressive "search and destroy" missions against the Viet Cong.[5]

President Johnson committed the United States to a course of intervention of epic proportions.  In a televised press conference on July 28, Johnson announced the increase in draft calls and the administration's plans in Vietnam.  The president said, "This really is war.  It is guided by North Vietnam and it is spurred by Communist China. Its goal is to conquer the South and to defeat America and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism."[6]   Johnson only acknowledged a commitment to raise U.S. forces from 75,000 to 120,000 and concealed the fact that U.S. troops were already fully employed in combat missions.[7]  He deceived the public about the size and the rate of the escalation.  

At the time, Johnson called on the American public for support and he got it.  Popular opinion was supportive and Congress responded overwhelmingly to endorse the president's plans.  There were scattered protests challenging the increase in the number of troops.  Most Americans, however, did not think much of antiwar protesters. 

More and more people began to see the war firsthand as the media outlets brought coverage of the fighting and killing into their homes each evening.  Sentiment toward the war slowly began to change as the number of U.S. casualties became significant.  The Viet Cong attacked U.S. bases in October of 1965, and a battle in the Ia Drang Valley left 240 American soldiers dead in one week.  People witnessed many of the 1,350 American soldiers killed in action that year via news reports.[8]

The antiwar movement that formed directly in response to the escalation of the war in 1965 was quite different from other movements of the time.  This movement did not have its roots in long-standing complaints of injustice or in a large-scale deficiency of basic civil rights.  This movement developed as a direct result of American participation in the civil war of Vietnam.[9]  The peace movement came into being slowly, and only as a result of purposeful initiatives by small groups of people.

The antiwar movement reached the national public when the National Teach-In convened in Washington D.C. on May 15, 1965.  Organizers of the teach-in invited supporters and opponents of the administration's plan to debate the issues pertaining to increased American involvement in Vietnam.  An antiwar speech by Hans J. Morgenthau presented the argument of the protesters at its most basic level.  He stressed two major points of contention: South Vietnam is not a sovereign state under attack by outside aggressors, and the United States has no binding legal or moral obligation to defend South Vietnam.  Morgenthau's speech illustrated the thoughtful discourse permeating the antiwar movement during its formative years of 1965 and 1966.  This movement began as an academic protest.  Protesters organized to show officials why they believed their perception of the war was wrong.  The antiwar movement invited supporters of the war to debate, believing they could change authorities' understanding of the war through intellectual discourse.  Theodore Windt explained that the "protesters demonstrated symbolically their commitment to a democratic society in which truth arises from argument rather than descends from edict."[10]

Opposition to the war, however, was not only intellectual.  To many people, the opposition was painfully real.  Young people could say they objected to the war on moral grounds, but even this would not protect them from the draft.  Some protesters sought protection in the Nuremberg principles.  These principles stated that "private people have a responsibility to act against governments that violate political morality," but that protection was hardly secure.  Irony pervades this example.  The United States government sanctioned the Nuremberg principles and enforced them at the Nazi trials, but then jailed protesters acting against its policies in Vietnam.  Protesters were rightfully confused.  They believed in their constitutional right to petition their government.  Assuming, idealistically, that America's democratic principles would be upheld in the truest sense, the original protesters went to petition their grievances.  They believed their government would be open to them and respond accordingly.  What these protesters found was much different.  No one listened to their grievances; they were asked to leave, criticized and sometimes attacked.[11]

The formation of the antiwar movement on campuses across the nation is said to have its roots in leftist organizations.  Chapters of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), however, were on many campuses before the antiwar movement officially originated.  Tom Hayden, co-founder of the organization in 1961, served as its president for two years.  While a junior at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Hayden met with leaders of student demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and of southern sit-in movements by black students.  Hayden, a committed reformer, shifted his focus to the antiwar movement along with other young people in 1965.  He explained why, in 1965, Vietnam became such a preoccupation for him:

I plunged into everything that had been written during the conflicts with the French. It was clear to me that Vietnam was a national independence war and not an expansion of communism based in Peking and Moscow, as Washington wanted us to believe . . . Johnson lied. The Democratic Party as a whole was behind the war and lied to the American people.[12]

Opposition began to grow on many campuses across the country.  Initially, state university protesters were a small minority, maybe because their communities looked upon activists as communist subversives.  At these state universities, antiwar protests started as nonviolent, the most common types being teach-ins, peace petitions addressed to Johnson and low-key demonstrations.  In contrast, elite schools experienced a surge of more violent protest in response to the escalation.  Schools such as the University of Michigan, Berkeley, the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison adopted even more violent tactics to convey their message.[13]  The contrast is evident.  While students at state schools struggled to build a nonviolent peace movement, elite universities witnessed more aggressive demonstrations.  This difference can be attributed to the cultural, socioeconomic and ideological differences generally associated with the students at the different institutions.  This dissimilarity aside, the peace movement expanded on most college campuses across the country. 

On March 24, 1965, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor held the nation's first "teach-in" on the war.  Over 3,000 people showed up to witness lectures and debate full of reasoned and passionate exchanges that lasted until early the next morning.  The campus was alive with debate on the conflict in Vietnam.  Author Tom Wells stated that it was easy to see the importance of the event:
Hierarchical relations between faculty and students received a stiff jolt; students locked horns with professors whose classes they had hardly spoken in. Opponents of the war gained valuable social support, inciting many to plan future protests.  Prowar participants were asked to explain their positions; some began questioning their allegiances.[14]
 
Teach-ins spread across America like wildfire following the success in Michigan.  Teach-ins were held at the University of Wisconsin on April 1, New York University on April 14, Rutgers University and the University of Oregon on April 23, in Washington on May 15 and at Berkeley on May 21 and 22.  Initially, their success created an enthusiasm amongst organizers convincing that the weight of "informed argument" could change the situation instantaneously.[15]

Situated in East Lansing, Michigan, Michigan State University seemed to fit the stereotype of a fairly large midwestern state school in the 1960s.  Prior to 1965, the antiwar movement failed to have much success at the school.  Most students were middle-class kids content with the status quo and their studies in the university.  Michigan students seemed to be somewhat isolated from the ongoing civil rights movement and other movements, like the women's movement and counterculture movement, which had yet to garner a great deal of attention in the Midwest.  Few people had reason to believe the United States would fail in its war in Southeast Asia.  As the escalation of America's role in the Vietnam War started to affect people more directly, the campus slowly moved toward an antiwar attitude. 

Lawrence Battistini spoke to students from the campus chapter of YSA on March 4, 1965.  Battistini, a Southeast Asia specialist, informed the few students there that America's policy in Vietnam would "inevitably replicate France's futile, humiliating experience in Indochina . . . . America was illegally intervening in a civil war between the Saigon government and the dissident National Liberation Front (NLF)."[16]  Political science graduate student and vice president of the campus chapter of YSA, Brian Keleher, announced a collaborative effort between the Michigan State University chapters of the SDS and the YSA to sponsor a peace march on Washington for April 17.  The march expected approximately 1,000 students to show up and protest Johnson's Vietnam policy.  Only about 30 students from Michigan State University signed up to take part in the march.  It seemed that relatively few students, faculty, or Americans in general were concerned about protesting Vietnam policy.  The Marines sent to Danang changed all of that and generated a great deal of interest in Vietnam.[17]

Michigan State University responded accordingly.  Battistini worked to form an Ad hoc MSU Faculty Committee for Peace in Vietnam.  The committee set up a teach-in, scheduled for the university on April 11, to inform students about the controversial decisions made by the Johnson administration.  This was the first legitimate antiwar action at the university.  It attracted approximately 2,000 students, but was not without opposition.  About 100 prowar students and faculty members attended the teach-in, disrupting the event as they heckled the antiwar speakers.  Students and faculty at the teach-in passed two resolutions.  In the first, participants resolved that the United States must immediately negotiate an end to the war.  The second resolved that MSU should work to eliminate the potential for future international conflict by establishing a War and Peace Research Center.[18]

As previously stated, teach-ins had a powerful influence on campuses across the country.  Following the teach-in at Michigan State University, over 130 students signed up to attend the march in Washington on April 17.  This was over four times the number signed up before the teach-in. 
The march on Washington turned out more than the expected 1,000 students.  In fact, fifteen times that amount marched to call for an end to the fighting in Vietnam.  Students filled the sidewalks, walking three or four across, carrying signs protesting American policy in Southeast Asia.  The protesters marched to the Sylvan Theater for a few speeches, and then walked down the Mall to the Capitol carrying a petition for Congress.  Speaking to the crowd of young people included Senator Ernest Gruening (D-AK), who urged the United States to stop the bombing of North Vietnam, journalist I. F. Stone, and Staughton Lynd, an assistant professor of history at Yale University. [19] 

Students from across the country attended the peaceful demonstration.  Bob Malone, a student from East Carolina College in Greenville, NC expressed his feelings.  "The war in Vietnam is essentially a civil war. A preponderance of the Vietnamese people want us to leave. Our statement that we are defending freedom is a fiction."[20] 

Michigan State University student Sandy Smith had never participated in a demonstration before, but carried a sign reading "War on Poverty, Not War on People."  Smith said, "I feel that the President responds to public opinion - look what he did on civil rights - and I want him to know that public opinion is behind him if he sees the possibility for negotiations."[21]  

The antiwar movement continued to grow at Michigan State University as the year continued, but this did not silence the prowar community at the university.  Hawkish faculty members sent letters to the editor of the State News, the campus publication, accusing the antiwar activists of being "communist appeasers," "psychotics" and "traitors."  Even the Johnson administration intervened, giving $25,000 in private funds to establish a national prowar information center and speakers' bureau on campus.[22]  The president and his supporters had obviously taken an interest in the growth of the antiwar movement, as they were spending money on subversive activities and monitoring the antiwar behavior across the country.

In October 1965 the first altercation between antiwar students and the university administration occurred.  Twenty students from MSU's SDS chapter set up two booths, one on each side of the Marine recruiting table, in the student union.  Two of the activists silently held up posters showing pictures of children horribly disfigured by napalm.  At the same time, the Marine recruiting table was showing films of U.S. aircrafts napalming targets in Vietnam.  The Marines threatened the activists, and the administrators managing the student union required the activists to leave.  Five students refused to leave.  The director of the MSU Department of Public Safety then charged the five students with trespassing and distributing commercial literature on university property.  The five students were released on bail and trial was set for March 1966.[23]  This first confrontation between students and the university was not yet solved when another threat to students sparked interest in the antiwar movement.

In November 1965 students in the nation's universities were threatened directly as the Selective Service director, Lewis Hershey, ordered that college student draft deferments be cut by at least 20 percent.  Johnson's escalation in Vietnam required more soldiers.  The announcement forced a change in policy at Michigan State University.  Students had to have a "C" average and score a 70 percent on a Selective Service intelligence exam to keep their 2-S status (draft deferment).  Many students were angry at this new policy as test questions on the examinations focused heavily on mathematics favoring business and engineering majors, while disadvantaging social science and liberal arts majors.  Director of the Selective Service in Michigan, Colonel John Holmes, told President Hannah to expel even more students at Michigan State, stating that only 10 percent of the students were qualified to be in school.  Holmes even stated that the "other 90 percent were unworthy of college educations and were shirking their patriotic duty in Vietnam."[24]  The idea that students would lose their deferment was too much for many of them, and antiwar activists benefited from this change in policy as more and more students joined the movement. 

March of 1966 brought the trials of the five students arrested at the student union in October of 1965.  The antiwar activists at Michigan State focused their attention on the trials.  A well-known civil liberties attorney, Conrad Lynn, represented the students, but failed.  He appealed the students' convictions at the Ingham County Circuit Court in late March.  The Circuit Court judge, obviously not a friend of the antiwar movement, increased their fines, sentenced the activists to 10-30 day jail terms, and denied them bail although they were appealing to Michigan's State Supreme Court.  Immediately following the ruling, about 30 students camped out in front of President Hannah's campus home.  President Hannah refused to speak with the students.  The students remained there for three days and nights protesting the denial of due process of law.  Ironically, one of the protesters was Louis Holmes, the daughter of Michigan Selective Service director John Holmes.  Over 200 students had accumulated by the third day and the media quickly picked up on the story.  News of the protest was statewide.  Even though the Michigan State Supreme Court upheld the students' convictions, the antiwar movement at Michigan State University received a good deal of publicity.[25] 

As talk of the activists' trials died, yet still another controversy took hold of the campus.  A radical West Coast magazine, Ramparts, published a story in its April issue highlighting a link between Michigan State University and the CIA.  Allegedly, the university and the CIA worked together in the outdated Vietnam Project.  The Vietnam Project, headed by the CIA, was used from 1955-1959.  The project operated a seven-year, multi-million dollar technical assistance program that trained police and public officials for Ngo Dinh Diem's regime at the request of the United States.[26]    

The campus was in a state of chaos.  Almost instantaneously, all three major television networks, the Detroit Free Press and the New York Times picked up the story.  Reporters covered the campus investigating the charges that MSU and the CIA were linked.  Michigan State political scientist and former assistant to the head of the Vietnam Project Robert Scigliano quit and took off to SUNY-Buffalo.  Soon after, the state legislature canceled a $10 million grant to MSU that was going to be used to establish a law school.  Hawkish faculty members called the Rampart article "silly, slimy smear" and defended the now useless Vietnam Project.[27] 

On April 14 former head of the Vietnam Project, Ralph Smuckler, insisted the university did not provide a cover for CIA operations in Indochina in the 1950s.  Then, only hours later, he admitted to the New York Times that MSU and the CIA had had a "special arrangement by which CIA operatives were granted faculty status at the university."[28]  The fact that CIA operatives were granted faculty status was not the only point of contention.  The article in Ramparts stated that the university was extremelyirresponsible.  The university served American policy in Vietnam and one professor, Wesley Fishel, a staunch prowar faculty member, was described as actively involved in helping to install Ngo Dinh Diem as President of South Vietnam.  The university project actually supplied the training South Vietnamese with guns and ammunition.  Some university reports were written to please President Diem and to protect the project, under which some professors were earning twice their regular salary, tax-free, and quickly gaining promotions.[29] 

President Hannah defended the university's role in developing the South Vietnamese state, contending it was were carrying out national policy to help the free world.  Wesely Fishel also tried to defend the university and his part in the Vietnam Project.  He addressed about a thousand interested students in the Union Ballroom on April 20, 1966.  Those in attendance failed to take him seriously, as his academic credibility had been ruined.[30]  The MSU chapter of SDS was in full force.  Three students wrote a song about Fishel, which they performed on campus (to the tune of "Secret Agent Man").  The SDS chapter attracted a diverse group of students following the publicity of the year's events.  The organization allowed its members to take part in a variety of activities from planning teach-ins and putting together antiwar rallies to writing and publishing in The Paper.  Ironically, the group's weakness was also its strength.  The group contained a diverse set of students with leaders that possessed huge egos and extreme passions, often causing tension.[31] 

In the fall of 1966, Michigan State University's SDS chapter and a new student antiwar organization called the University Christian Movement (UCM) worked together to bring a series of dispatches from Vietnam by Marine private Jim Thomas.  The Paper published the stories and poems Thomas wrote while serving in Vietnam.  On December 20, 1966, Thomas was killed in action.  Students across the campus were devastated, as they had been following his stories of service in Southeast Asia.  Consequently, Michigan State University SDSers Harvey Goldman and Mike Price traveled to the national SDS convention at UC-Berkeley where they voted to form antidraft unions to disrupt military recruitment.  SDS justified this commitment to illegal action against the government with moral and constitutional law.  It stated that the Selective Service Act violated the 13th Amendment by forcing them into servitude.[32]  With this action, it is easy to see the changes in the antiwar movement at Michigan State University in just a year and a half.  Sentiment had changed and students were more politically active than ever before.  Even community members were becoming sympathetic to the antiwar activists and their cause.  Another way to show the growing acceptance and participation in the antiwar movement on Michigan State's campus is to highlight the 1967 'Vietnam Summer.'

The summer of 1967 became known as the 'Vietnam Summer' in the Lansing, MI area.  Over 100 volunteers, mostly students, but a few community members as well, worked for the Vietnam Summer Project.  From June until the end of September, Lansing volunteers covered one voting precinct every week, pushing residents to voice their concerns about American policy in Vietnam.  They surveyed public opinion about the war and communicated with residents about pressing issues.  The volunteers believed that by working through the electoral system, they could bring about real social change.[33]

In October of 1967, Michigan State students again marched on Washington, but this time the march was confrontational.  Frustrated by the continued escalation of the war, approximately 50,000 protesters stormed the Pentagon.  White House officials watched from command posts on the roof and listened to the protesters chant, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today!"[34]  Protesters breached the lines of Federal marshals backed by armed soldiers.  They were repeatedly driven back by the rifle butts of the soldiers and the marshals' nightsticks.  A student at MSU, Jeff Snoyer, described his feelings about the violent atmosphere of the demonstration:

I was sincerely for peace and nonviolence, but I found myself grabbing the arm of a GI whose rifle butt was about to crush in the head of a girl in front of me; I was pushing and being hit - soldiers were rushing all around us - what was happening?  This was Americans fighting Americans, pitted against each other by the System.[35]

Robert McNamara's description of the rally showed another side of the story.  He told of the young women that rubbed their breasts against soldiers standing guard at the Pentagon, and the protesters that threw mud balls, picket signs, sticks and rocks at the troops.[36] 

In the evening, after a couple hundred students burned their draft cards, U.S. marshals clubbed and arrested the activists filling the street around the Pentagon.  Some 20 students attempted to crawl under a flat-bed press truck near the steps of the Mall.  Marshals dove after the protesters, hitting them with their nightsticks.  A few minutes later a new group of military policemen, carrying tear gas grenades, came out from the Mall and set up a third defense line.  By the end of the two-day demonstration, the steps of the Pentagon were splattered with blood, but there had been no reports of serious injuries.  At least 650 demonstrators were arrested.[37]

Early on, young people trusted traditional forms of peaceful protest, concentrating on demonstrations, speeches, petitions and letters. These failed to change Johnson's policies in Vietnam and the protesters' patience faded.  The war continued to grow and American soldiers continued to die.  Members of the antiwar movement became tired of their traditional measures.  The administration had tried to appease the public and coerce them into supporting the war effort by using a language that transformed people into "personnel," terrible deaths into weekly statistics, failures into successes and a repressive military dictatorship into a free, democratic government.  Jerry Rubin described the problem in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio:

When they control the words they control everything. . . . They got 'war' meaning 'peace,' they got 'fuck' being a 'bad word,' they got 'napalm' being a good word, they got 'decency' that to me is indecent.  The whole thing is backwards, and we gotta turn it around.[38]

As corruption and deceit on the part of the government became more apparent to people, antiwar demonstrators realized that they had to change their strategies.  Orderly and manageable protests were soon replaced by disorderly confrontations, often involving violence.

Rallies and demonstrations increased enormously during 1967.  Opposition to the war took a number of different forms.  Thousands of Americans found and abused legal loopholes; some even mutilated themselves to dodge the draft.  Young people took off to Canada, even served jail time, just so they would not have to serve in Vietnam.  Folk singer Joan Baez refused to pay the portion of her income tax that went to the defense budget.  Boxer Muhammed Ali announced that he was a conscientious objector and refused to go to war.[39] 
Examining the transition of the antiwar movement, from one that was small and peaceful to a movement that became influential and confrontational, is important to be able to understand the changing public sentiment of the time.  To look at how government officials, those directly involved with policymaking, dealt with these changes is quite interesting.  For some officials, the changes affected their families and relationships, for others their work relationships, but it is certain that all were personally affected in some way by the strengthening of the antiwar movement during the mid-1960s.

Secretary of State Dean Rusk played an important role in the decision-making process during the escalation of America's role in the Vietnam War.  He was involved when sending the troops to Danang, commencing the bombing of North Vietnam, sending American troops to combat and when committing America to defend the state of South Vietnam.  The policies he was a part of greatly affected his son, Richard.  Richard was then a student at Cornell University.  Richard had tried to believe in America's policy, but soon realized the evidence against it was too strong.  He did not want to volunteer for Vietnam, and he was unwilling to join the antiwar movement for fear of embarrassing his father.  He struggled internally with what he called "the growing horror of Vietnam."  All of this led to emotional and psychological collapse one year after his father left office.[40]

Senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze's children were actively involved in the antiwar movement.  Three of his four children participated in the protest at the Pentagon in October of 1967, while Nitze was busy planning the government's defense tactics for that famous demonstration.  One of his children worked closely with the radical leadership of Columbia University's SDS chapter.  Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor had two sons who were antiwar organizers.  Paul Warnke's daughter, a student at Harvard, participated in a number of demonstrations in Washington.  She and her friends (other antiwar protesters) often stayed the night at Warnke's home.  Senior CIA official William Colby's daughter, Catherine, died in 1973 after suffering from severe emotional problems due to the Vietnam war.[41]

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and his son, Craig, experienced an amazing amount of tension.  In fact, they did not speak to each other for years.  In 1966, Craig put up a small NLF flag in his room and on the opposite wall hung an American flag upside down.  He was extremely torn between his love for his father and his hatred for the policies his father supported.  This tension was aggravated by a lack of communication between Craig and his father.  Craig entered Stanford University in 1969 and began actively participating in the antiwar movement.  He left Stanford in the spring of 1971 for Chile.  He wanted a firsthand look at how President Salvador Allende's socialist government was working there.  Craig said, "I felt an enormous sense of frustration with my family, with my country.  I felt there was nothing I could do to change my father.  And so I left the country."[42]  

American policy in Vietnam caused tension in families, homes, universities and communities across the nation.  As the Johnson administration escalated American commitment in Southeast Asia and body counts rolled in, more and more of the public grew weary of policy sending their children to war.  Young people on college campuses took an active role to demonstrate their anger with the administration's decisions.  Young people's opposition to the war was not unfounded.  This opposition to the war was real and urgent.  Their belief in America's system of democracy led them to protest by way of peaceful demonstrations, rallies, petitions and speeches.  As their demands were being continually ignored, their means of protest turned more confrontational and aggressive.  The antiwar movement was a compelling voice for the people standing against the war.  The movement became more influential as a direct result of the administration's increasing commitment to the failing state of South Vietnam.  In hindsight, the activists were correct in their opposition.  America failed in Vietnam.  Even though America failed, it is important to remember and acknowledge those critical voices that worked tirelessly to expose their message of peace. 
 


------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Wells, Tom. The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam. 19.

[2] DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. 104.

[3] Wells, Tom. The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam. 22.

[4] DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. 104.

[5] Ibid. 122.

[6] Ibid. 122.

[7] Bloom, Alexander. Long Time Gone. 56.

[8] DeBenedetti, Charles. An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era. 123.

[9] Windt, Theodore. Presidents and Protesters: Political Rhetoric in the 1960s. 169.

[10] Ibid. 170.

[11] Ibid. 175.

[12] Dorland, Gil. Legacy of Discord: Voices of the Vietnam War Era. 68.

[13] Heineman, Kenneth J. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. 130.

[14] Wells, Tom. The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam. 24.

[15] Powers, Thomas. The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People, 1964-1968. 56.

[16] Heineman, Kenneth J. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. 131.

[17] Ibid. 131.

[18] Ibid. 132.

[19] "15,000 White House Pickets Denounce Vietnam War." 1.

[20] Ibid. 3.

[21] Ibid. 3.

[22] Heineman, Kenneth J. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. 132.

[23] Ibid. 133.

[24] Ibid. 134.

[25] Ibid. 135.

[26] Frankel, Max. "University Project Cloaked CIA Role in Saigon, 1955-1959." 1.

[27] Heineman, Kenneth. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. 136.

[28] Ibid. 136.

[29] Frankel, Max. "University Project Cloaked CIA Role in Saigon, 1955-1959." 2.

[30] Heineman, Kenneth. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. 137.

[31] Ibid. 138.

[32] Ibid. 140.

[33] Ibid. 144.

[34] Sheehan, Neil. Bright Shining Lie. 695.

[35] Heineman, Kenneth. Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. 145.

[36] McNamara, Robert. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. 304.

[37] Loftus, Joseph. "Guards Repulse War Protesters at the Pentagon." 1.

[38] Windt, Theodore. Presidents and Protesters: Political Rhetoric in the 1960s. 220.

[39] Herring, George C. America's Longest War. 172.

[40] Rusk, Dean. As I Saw It. 420.

[41] Wells, Tom. The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam. 107-108.

[42] Ibid. 110.