Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War

• 1. Introduction

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  Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began as a handful of demonstrators and grew into one of the largest social movements in American history. On the 2nd of May 1964, fewer than eighty people marched against the war in Harvard Square. Less than six years later, roughly 15 million Americans would take to the streets in a single day. What transformed a small gathering outside a university gate into a force that shook presidencies, reshaped the draft, and put a new generation of Americans in confrontation with their own government? The answers stretch across nearly a decade, from the first teach-ins on college campuses to veterans throwing their medals on the steps of the Capitol. And the movement itself was never a single thing. It was students and clergy, civil rights leaders and jazz musicians, mothers and longshoremen, Asian-American veterans and Chicano farmworkers. Each group brought its own reasons, its own tactics, and its own understanding of what the war in Vietnam meant for the United States at home.

• 2. Why People Said No

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  The draft was the sharpest edge of the conflict for most young Americans. In late July 1965, President Lyndon Johnson doubled the number of men to be drafted each month from 17,000 to 35,000. At a stroke, the war became personal for millions of families. Yet the draft was not simply unpopular because it was dangerous. Critics argued it was administered with deliberate unfairness, falling hardest on minorities and men without the economic resources to attend college or hire lawyers. By 1967, the system was calling as many as 40,000 men for induction each month, and one-quarter of all court cases dealt with draft-related charges. Over 210,000 men faced accusations of draft offenses, and 25,000 were formally indicted.

  Television added a new dimension that earlier American wars had never faced. By the 1950s, the television had become common in American homes, and for the first time in American history, the media had the means to broadcast battlefield images directly into living rooms. NBC's Frank McGee stated on air that the war was all but lost as "a conclusion to be drawn inescapably from the facts." Graphic footage on the nightly news stripped away any suggestion that combat was glorious.

  For many college students, the opposition took on a moral character that went beyond the draft. Students were more likely than the general public to argue that the United States had imperialistic goals in Vietnam and to call the war "immoral." The photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong captive in handcuffs on a public street in Saigon during the Tet Offensive became one of the most cited pieces of photographic evidence that the war's conduct could not be defended. The American Friends Service Committee had purchased a page in The New York Times as early as May 1954, just after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, to warn of exactly this kind of involvement.

• 3. Escalation in the Streets

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  The first large-scale organized demonstration took place on the 17th of April 1965, in Washington, D.C., organized primarily by Students for a Democratic Society. More than 20,000 people are believed to have participated. Just weeks earlier, on the 8th of March 1965, US ground troops had arrived in Vietnam. Student activists at the University of California, Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft Board on the 5th of May 1965, and forty students staged the first public draft-card burning in the United States.

  The government responded quickly. On the 31st of August 1965, President Johnson signed the Draft Card Mutilation Act, making it a federal crime to knowingly destroy or mutilate a draft card. Within weeks, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam staged a draft-card burning in New York that resulted in the first arrest under the new law.

  The most dramatic statements came in November 1965. On November 2, Norman Morrison, a 32-year-old Quaker, set himself on fire in front of the Pentagon. On November 9, Roger Allen LaPorte, a 22-year-old member of the Catholic Worker Movement, did the same in front of United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Both acts were conscious imitations of Buddhist self-immolation protests that had been ongoing in South Vietnam.

  By October 1967, resistance had grown organized enough that draft-card turn-ins were held across the country on a single day, yielding more than 1,000 cards. Attorney General Ramsey Clark chose to prosecute a group of ringleaders, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr., in Boston in 1968. The Pentagon itself became a battleground that same month, when a crowd of some 35,000 gathered, with some scaling the walls and forcing their way inside. Deputy Marshals made 682 arrests and 47 people were injured.

• 4. Race, the Draft, and a Divided Movement

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  In 1965 and 1966, African Americans accounted for 25 percent of combat deaths in Vietnam, more than twice their proportion of the population. The military eventually brought the proportion of Black casualties down to 12.6 percent, apparently in response to widespread protest. But the structural inequity was baked into the draft's design: in 1967, although Black men made up 29 percent of all draft-eligible men, 64 percent of those eligible Black men were chosen for conscription, compared to 31 percent of eligible white men.

  Martin Luther King Jr. first criticized the war in March 1965 during the Selma March, telling a journalist that "millions of dollars can be spent every day to hold troops in South Vietnam and our country cannot protect the rights of Negroes in Selma." His formal anti-war speech came on the 4th of April 1967, at the Riverside Church in New York, where he attacked President Johnson for "deadly Western arrogance" and declared that "we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor." The speech drew condemnation from liberal papers like the Washington Post and The New York Times. The NAACP disavowed him. Diplomat Ralph Bunche argued publicly that linking civil rights to the anti-war cause would set back Black Americans.

  Muhammad Ali had already made his own stand in 1966, risking his career and a prison sentence to resist the draft. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had become the first major civil rights group to issue a formal anti-war statement in 1965. When Georgia Representative Julian Bond, backed by SNCC, acknowledged agreement with that statement, the state of Georgia refused him his seat. He successfully appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

  Black anti-war organizations sometimes operated separately from white ones, marching under different banners: "Self-determination for Black America and Vietnam," against the white movement's "Support Our GIs, Bring Them Home Now!" Paul Robeson had signaled this independent tradition back in 1954, calling Ho Chi Minh "the modern day Toussaint Louverture, leading his people to freedom."

• 5. The Moratorium and Its Aftermath

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  In May 1969, Life magazine published photographs of roughly 250 American servicemen killed in Vietnam during a single "routine week" of fighting that spring. The issue sold out. The images of ordinary young men struck readers in a way that statistics had not.

  On the 15th of October 1969, hundreds of thousands of people participated in National Moratorium anti-war demonstrations across the United States. Workers called in sick, adolescents skipped school. About 15 million Americans took part, making it the largest single-day protest in the country's history to that point. A second round of Moratorium demonstrations on November 15 drew even more people. Over half a million rallied in Washington, D.C., and about 250,000 rallied in San Francisco. The Washington demonstration was preceded by the "March against Death" on November 13 and 14.

  Protests spiked again in April 1970 after President Nixon announced the expansion of the war into Cambodia. On the 4th of May 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine. Protests spread to campuses across the country. A three-hour battle at the Baker University Center at Ohio University resulted in 23 injured and 54 arrested students; the campus closed on May 15. From 1969 to 1970 alone, student protesters attacked 197 ROTC buildings on college campuses.

  In April 1971, thousands of Vietnam veterans converged on the White House, and hundreds threw their medals and decorations on the steps of the United States Capitol. The Pentagon Papers were published in June 1971. In November 1971, thousands of protesters built temporary barricades in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration arrested about 7,000 people. The last US combat troops withdrew from Vietnam in August 1972, and the last draftees reported in early 1973.

• 6. Songs Against the War

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  Over 5,000 Vietnam War-related songs have been recorded, a body of music that dwarfed the pro-war compositions that had characterized the World War II era. The anti-war canon spanned folk, rock, and classical composition, and involved names including Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Jimi Hendrix.

  As early as the summer of 1965, P. F. Sloan's folk rock song "Eve of Destruction," recorded by Barry McGuire, was among the earliest musical protests against the Vietnam War. Country Joe and the Fish released what became known as the movement's unofficial anthem, "The Fish Cheer/I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag," first issued on an EP in the October 1965 issue of Rag Baby. The song used sarcasm to highlight both the war and what its writers saw as the public's naive attitude toward it. It was performed at Woodstock in 1969.

  Jimi Hendrix occupied a complicated position. He was a former soldier who, according to one biographer, sympathized with the anticommunist view of the war. Yet he protested its violence directly. His song "Machine Gun," dedicated to those fighting in Vietnam, expressed horror at the killing. His performances were often accompanied by calls to bring soldiers home. His words have been widely quoted: "when the power of love overcomes the love of power... the world will know peace."

  Bob Dylan did not set out to write protest songs, but his audience claimed him anyway. Todd Gitlin, a student movement leader at the time, was quoted as saying, "Whether he liked it or not, Dylan sang for us." Joan Baez and Judy Collins performed "The Times They Are A-Changin'" at a 1965 march against the war and also before President Johnson. John Lennon and Yoko Ono introduced "Give Peace a Chance" during one of their publicized sit-ins, and the song became what many described as the defining peace anthem of the 1970s. In May 1968, a "Composers and Musicians for Peace" concert was staged in New York, reflecting how far formal musical opposition to the war had grown.

• 7. Women, Labor, and the Wider Coalition

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  Women were central to the anti-war movement, though they were sometimes treated as subordinate within opposition organizations. Groups they formed or joined included Another Mother for Peace, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and Women Strike for Peace. Members of Women For Peace showed up at the White House every Sunday for eight years from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for a peace vigil. These organizations also ran free draft counseling centers, advising young men on both legal and illegal ways to avoid service.

  The National Welfare Rights Organisation, established in 1967, linked the cost of the war to domestic poverty, criticizing the government for spending on Vietnam rather than on families at home. In 1971, the Third World Women's Alliance expanded this work by bringing together Black, Puerto Rican, Chicana, Asian, and Indigenous women under an explicitly anti-imperialist framework. Women protested the use of napalm, a weapon produced by the Dow Chemical Company, by boycotting Saran Wrap, another product from the same manufacturer.

  Labor opposition followed a complicated path. AFL-CIO leadership publicly supported the war at the outset, shaped partly by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which barred communists from elected union positions. But smaller unions moved faster. Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Workers Union in New York signed a proclamation at a 1964 convention denouncing US involvement. The International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union signed a similar proclamation in 1965. By 1969, AFL-CIO-affiliated unions including the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters broke with federation leadership to form an antiwar alliance. A protest organized with Teamster involvement on the 25th of April 1971, in Washington, D.C., drew over 250,000 people.

  The Chicano Moratorium march brought 20,000 to 30,000 activists to the streets of eastern Los Angeles. Mexican-Americans had died at twice the rate of any other group in Vietnam, a disparity tied to exclusion from higher education and high unemployment that left many with few options beyond military service. The march began peacefully but turned violent when the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department responded with tear gas and clubs, killing three people. Among those killed was Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar, for whom Laguna Park was later renamed.