Antiwar protest marches in major cities (1 gen 1965 anni – 1 gen 1970 anni)

Descrizione:

At first, Johnson’s Vietnam policy enjoyed wide support. Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike had approved the escalation, and public opinion polls in 1965 and 1966 agreed. But opinion began to shift as images of the war played on television every night (see “Thinking Like a Historian”). The evening news brought the carnage of Vietnam into U.S. homes, including images of dead and wounded Americans. In the first months of fighting in 1965, television reporter Morley Safer witnessed a marine unit burning the South Vietnamese village of Cam Ne to the ground. “Today’s operation is the frustration of Vietnam in miniature,” Safer explained. America can “win a military victory here, but to a Vietnamese peasant whose home is [destroyed] it will take more than presidential promises to convince him that we are on his side.”


What journalists saw firsthand increasingly conflicted with official statements on the progress of the fighting. War correspondents began to write about a “credibility gap.” The Johnson administration, they charged, was concealing bad news about the situation in Vietnam. In February 1966, hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (chaired by J. William Fulbright, an outspoken critic of the war, and broadcast on television) raised further questions about the administration’s policy. Johnson complained to his staff in 1966 that “our people can’t stand firm in the face of heavy losses, and they can bring down the government.” The economics of the war were politically costly as well. The war cost taxpayers $27 billion in 1967, pushing the federal deficit from $9.8 billion to $23 billion. Military spending launched an inflationary spiral that would plague the American economy throughout the 1970s.

The escalating war was felt at an intimate level as well. Between 1960 and 1966, with the draft a fixture of American life, three-quarters of a million men were inducted into the American military (another million plus would be added before the war’s end), affecting families and communities in every state. During the 1964 presidential campaign, Johnson had given a speech in New Hampshire saying, “I want to be very cautious and careful and use it [military offensive] only as a last resort … now we lost 190 American lives, and to each one of those 190 families this is a major war.” Despite his stated caution and the certainty that a wider war would multiply those 190 families many thousands of times over, Johnson believed he had no alternative than to plunge ahead. Though the deadliest years of the war still lay ahead, by the end of 1966 almost 7,000 Americans had died in Vietnam, their average age just 23.


As the military campaign in Vietnam bogged down, an antiwar movement gathered. There had been little public resistance in 1964, even after the Tonkin Resolution authorized Johnson to commit forces. But following the escalation in 1965, groups of students, clergy, civil rights advocates, antinuclear proponents, and even Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose book on child care had helped raise many young boomers, began to protest. Their launchpad was an April 1965 march of 15,000 people in Washington, D.C., that included a picket line around the White House and speeches denouncing what activist Paul Potter called “this mad war.” Despite their diversity, these opponents of the war shared a deep skepticism about the aims and motivations of U.S. policy in Vietnam. They advanced a number of different charges: that intervention was antithetical to American ideals; that an independent, anticommunist South Vietnam was unattainable; and that no strategic objective justified the suffering the war was inflicting on the Vietnamese people.

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