The Antiwar Movement Against Vietnam In The US From 1965-1971 Essays

The antiwar movement against Vietnam in the US from 1965-1971 was the most significant movement of its kind in the nation's history. The United States first became directly involved in Vietnam in 1950 when President Harry Truman started to underwrite the costs of France's war against the Viet Minh. Later, the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy increased the US's political, economic, and military commitments steadily throughout the fifties and early sixties in the Indochina region. Prominent senators had already begun criticizing American involvement in Vietnam during the summer of 1964, which led to the mass antiwar movement that was to appear in the summer of 1965. This antiwar movement had a great impact on policy and practically forced the US out of Vietnam. Starting with teach-ins during the spring of 1965, the massive antiwar efforts centered on the colleges, with the students playing leading roles. These teach-ins were mass public demonstrations, usually held in the spring and fall seasons. By 1968, protesters numbered almost seven million with more than half being white youths in the college. The teach-in movement was at first, a gentle approach to the antiwar activity. Although, it faded when the college students went home during the summer of 1965, other types of protest that grew through 1971 soon replaced it. All of these movements captured the attention of the White House, especially when 25,000 people marched on Washington Avenue. And at times these movements attracted the interest of all the big decision-makers and their advisors (Gettleman, 54). The teach-ins began at the University of Michigan on March 24, 1965, and spread to other campuses, including Wisconsin on April 1. These protests at some of America's finest universities captured public attention. The Demonstrations were one form of attempting to go beyond mere words and research and reason, and to put direct pressure on those who were conducting policy in apparent disdain for the will expressed by the voters (Spector, 30-31). Within the US government, some saw these teach-ins as an important development that might slow down on further escalation in Vietnam. Although several hundred colleges experienced teach-ins, most campuses were untouched by this circumstance. Nevertheless, the teach-ins did concern the administration and contributed to President Johnson's decision to present a major Vietnam address at Johns Hopkins University on April 7, 1965. The address tried to respond to the teach-ins campus protest activity. The Johns Hopkins speech was the first major example of the impact of antiwar. Johnson was trying to stabilize public opinion while the campuses were bothering the government. In 1965, the US started strategically bombing parts of Northern Vietnam, catalyzing the antiwar movement public opinion of what was going on in Indochina. These bombings spawned the antiwar movement and sustained it, especially as the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh refused to listen to American demands (VN History and Politics). The antiwar movement would have emerged alone by the bombings, and the growing cost of American lives coming home in body bags only intensified public opposition to the war (VN H. and P.). This movement against the Northern bombings, and domestic critics in general, played a role in the decision to announce a bombing pause from May 12 to the 17, of 1965. Antiwar activists carried on through the pause with their own programs, and the scattered teach-ins had become more of a problem for President Johnson when their organizers joined in an unofficial group, the Inter-University Committee for a Public Hearing on Vietnam. This new committee began planning a nationwide teach-in to be conducted on television and radio, of which would be a debate between protesters and administrators of the government. The antiwar movement, through the national teach-in, contributed to the resignations of many government officials, including the resignation of McGeorge Bundy in early 1966. This well-publicized debate made the antiwar effort more respectable. As supporters of the war found themselves more popular, they were driven increasingly to rely on equating their position with"support for our boys in Vietnam." (Brown, 34). The antiwar movement spread directly among the combat troops in Vietnam, who began to wear peace symbols and flash peace signs and movement salutes. Some units even organized their own demonstrations to link up with the movement at home (Schlight, 45). For example, to join the November 1969 antiwar Mobilization, a unit boycotted its Thanksgiving Day dinner (Schlight, 45). One problem of the antiwar movement was the difficulty of finding ways to move beyond protest and symbolic acts to deeds that would actually impede the war. Unlike college students and other civilians, the troops in Vietnam had no such problem. Individual acts of rebellion, raging from