By Yvonne Hayes

‘Out Now!’ – A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. Against the Vietnam War by Fred Halstead should be in the library of everyone seeking social justice. It is a handbook for political organizing. It is a vivid and accurate narrative by one of the central leaders of the debates, street protests, and skirmishes of a movement that changed the U.S. political landscape in ways that reverberate today — a movement that helped the Vietnamese people hand U.S. imperialism its first major military defeat.

The book was published in 1978. But the lessons of that era clearly outlined in its pages are invaluable in the current struggles to oppose Washington’s escalating wars and the march toward authoritarianism and one-man rule.

Halstead, a World War II veteran, joined the socialist movement in 1948 at the age of 21. He became a skilled garment cutter in Los Angeles and an activist in the labor movement. In 1953, in the depths of the anticommunist witch hunt,^[1] he moved to Detroit where he worked as an upholstery cutter in the auto industry. There he joined the nascent civil rights movement, building support for the Montgomery bus boycott.^[2]

These were among the experiences that equipped Halstead to play a leading role in shaping and holding together a movement of diverse forces that were often politically at odds with one another.

IN REVIEW

“I was not a detached observer of these events but … a partisan of the antiwar movement, centrally involved in its activities,” Halstead writes in the book’s preface. “What is more, I was a spokesperson for one of the distinct political tendencies within the movement and took part in the various disputes over policy that shaped it.”

Halstead was a leader of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and ran for U.S. president on its ticket in 1968. By then he was well-known and widely respected in the antiwar movement for his revolutionary politics and leadership.

“I do not pretend to have been neutral in these controversies,” Halstead explains. “But I have tried to get the facts straight — even when they didn’t serve my preconceptions.” This rings true throughout the nearly 1,000 pages of narrative as Halstead takes a critical look at the ideas, actions, successes, and errors along the way.

Halstead traces the history of the movement using notes, documents, news reports, and interviews with participants. He places its development, its ups and downs, in the context of the broader history unfolding in Southeast Asia and around the world.

Well annotated and indexed, Out Now! provides not just a history of what happened, but how and why.

*

In July 1959, when the first U.S. soldiers were killed, Vietnam was far from the consciousness of a U.S. working class then marked by the relative stability of the post-World War II era. The post-war anticommunist witch hunt had tamed the labor movement, driving out radical and communist workers, and stripped it of any impulse toward political action independent of the Democratic and Republican parties. The idea that the U.S. military should intervene to “stop communism” abroad was widely accepted.

However, the Civil Rights Movement — beginning in the mid-1950s — and the victory of the Cuban Revolution^[3] in 1959 had begun to change U.S. politics and, in particular, made an impact on young people. Radicalizing youth, some drawn to the traditional peace organizations, entered the stage less fettered by anti-communist hysteria than previous generations. Their eyes were on issues of social justice not just at home, but around the world.

The challenge then, as it is now, was to unite forces in common political action when those forces held very different perspectives on social change. As the U.S. military became more deeply mired in Vietnam, what was the road forward for those who opposed Washington’s imperialist war and saw it as a key issue?

Red baiting vs. non-exclusion

This question could only be answered — and a united, national movement built — through open, democratic discussion of proposals and ideas. One of the first obstacles to achieving this was the red-baiting and exclusionist policies of the old peace movement, holdovers of the McCarthy era. Even as Vietnam crept into the consciousness of the American public, these groups — focused on opposing nuclear weapons and suspicious of radicals of any stripe — refused to take up the Southeast Asian war.

In this fight, the movement found a champion in A.J. Muste, a radical pacifist. Muste had been part of every U.S. movement for social change since World War I and was widely respected, including by those who did not share all his views.

In a 1966 article in the Mobilizer,^[4] Muste wrote: “To maintain a radical anti-war coalition is a difficult and delicate task … a cooperative effort of individuals covering a wide spread of opinion. It demands a high sense of responsibility on everyone’s part … [not] slurring over differences and avoiding genuine dialogue, but … ‘bearing these differences in common.’ What no doubt clinches the matter is that if we were to abandon the ‘non-exclusion’ principle we would quickly disintegrate.”

This stance shaped the democratic method tried and tested throughout the war. Periodic national and regional conferences, with open — sometimes messy and raucous — debate, allowed activists to hash out their differences, find common ground when possible, and plan coordinated action.

Combatting red-baiting in the early stages of the movement also prepared antiwar forces to stand up to the inevitable government charges that those involved were merely a “pro-communist” fringe.

Look to the Establishment? Or to the masses of workers and their allies?

Out Now! provides a clear analysis of the strategies and tactics promoted by the various tendencies within the antiwar movement. Their perspectives depended upon which classes in society they saw as key to getting the U.S. military out of Southeast Asia.

The liberal wing of the movement looked to the capitalist class, hoping “progressives” in the Democratic Party could convince the rulers to end the war. They favored demands that would be palatable to Democratic “doves,” calling for a negotiated settlement and gradual withdrawal from Vietnam. And they tended to view street actions simply as a means to sway Democratic leaders and shift electoral outcomes. Otherwise, they felt, demonstrations were a distraction from local organizing of a “power base” for future change.

This focus on electoral politics endured, even after successive administrations — both Democratic and Republican — continued to escalate the U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia. Halstead details how the preoccupation with electing “peace candidates” contributed to the uneven rhythm of the movement, making organizing actions against the war much more difficult during election periods.

Of course, after each election, no matter the results, the war went on, often with more intensity than before.

Halstead was convinced that reliance on the capitalist class was a fundamental error. However, he points out, “the tendency … to focus their appeal on the Establishment and to trim their demands to the confines of two-party politics was not without its logic. The U.S. government was the one force which could have stopped the war any time it wanted to.”

Another wing of the movement was composed of a layer of radical pacifists, youth, and left-wing organizations, many of whom claimed to champion working-class struggle. In reality, they lacked confidence in the possibility of the emergence of a mass, radicalized working-class movement.

Increasingly frustrated as the war dragged on despite all the evidence that public opinion against the war was deepening, these forces were drawn to civil disobedience and confrontation as a means to “spark a spontaneous wave of decentralized resistance that would then and there dissolve the power of the war-makers,” Halstead writes. This ultraleft approach “was a pipe dream,” he explains.

“To a certain extent such notions had been encouraged by the experience of the Southern civil rights movement of the early 1960s,” Halstead notes. “Sometimes civil disobedience initiated by relative handfuls did precipitate a widespread national reaction against the segregationists. But there was at least one crucial difference…. The civil disobedience had been against local law and local authority that was itself in violation of federal law…. The most successful civil disobedience was specifically designed to precipitate a confrontation between local and federal authorities.”

However, “the antiwar movement had no such leverage,” says Halstead. “For the antiwar movement it was much more difficult to make the message of civil disobedience by small numbers clear and the embarrassment it might produce for the federal government was not at all automatic.”

The labor movement and changes on its edges

The lack of confidence in the possibility of engaging organized labor was also not without reason. “Many of the newly radicalizing youth,” explains Halstead, “tended to view the organized labor movement as a pillar of ‘the Establishment’ and among the last places to look for decisive aid to the antiwar cause. If one judged from the top leadership of the American union movement, the pragmatic impression of these youth was entirely understandable.”

Throughout the war, the top AFL-CIO leadership remained staunchly in the pocket of the warmakers, determined not to rock the boat and sink their own privileged positions.

“It was not prowar sentiment on the part of the rank and file that kept the bulk of the unions out of the antiwar movement,” Halstead explains. “It was the bureaucracy. And the objective conditions during the 1960s for a cracking of that bureaucratic hold were not favorable. There was, however, some important union involvement that developed from small beginnings and which by 1970 was growing much more rapidly.”

Halstead describes the special circumstances that made possible the beginnings of union involvement in the antiwar movement. These fell roughly into three categories: unions whose membership and leadership included large percentages of oppressed nationalities; unions with a radical history and a leadership that retained features of that tradition; and unions where much of the membership and leadership was fresh out of college and had themselves been part of the student radicalization.

“It is a law of political life that changes often appear first on the edges, around the cracks and fissures… rather than in the decisive central weight of a social organism,” Halstead explains, offering invaluable insight into the process of social change that had begun to manifest itself in the labor movement. “If the process is real, and not illusory or artificial, changes around the edges are both indications of and contributors to coming change in the more decisive sectors.”

Ultralefts and other forces did not see or appreciate such changes that would eventually have “molecular effects,” as Halstead pointed out in a 1971 article. “That is, they touch the stuff of which the society is constructed, and the effects can be profound and much more widespread than the people directly involved.”

The ultralefts, with eyes on the continuing talks in Paris^[5] between Washington and Hanoi, seesawed between demands for a negotiated end to the war on some future date and calls for “victory to the NLF [National Liberation Front]”^[6] and to “smash imperialism and the state.”

If for moral reasons alone, Halstead argues, people in the United States needed to focus on the role of their own government, calling for an immediate end to the war: “Out now!”

The Vietnamese might negotiate a settlement falling short of complete U.S. withdrawal because they had a gun to their heads. The U.S. antiwar movement, on the other hand, had to clearly affirm that U.S. intervention in Vietnam was illegitimate and that a call for anything less than immediate U.S. withdrawal was a violation of the sovereignty of the Vietnamese people.

Antiwar or multi-issue organizations?

The ultralefts also bristled at the movement’s “narrow” focus. They argued in favor of a multi-issue approach, combining opposition to the war with fighting racism, supporting women’s rights, and, in the case of some, advocating an end to imperialism. Radical pacifist and anarchist David Dellinger, a leading antiwar figure, at times “disparaged mobilizations for ‘immediate withdrawal’ as united fronts on the ‘lowest common denominator’,” Halstead writes.

“The inevitable logic of a multi-issue umbrella,” he argues, “would have to be a coalition of radical-liberal forces subordinated to the multi-issue program of the liberal politicians, to a wing of the Democratic Party. In Marxist terminology, a ‘popular front’.”

In a 1965 article in The Militant newspaper, Halstead explained, “[The antiwar movement] is a movement in which the great majority of the participants are [committed] only on the issue of getting the U.S. out of Vietnam…. The worst abuse of this situation would be for any tendency to attempt to turn these independent committees into a front for its particular multi-issue program, a front which draws people in on the Vietnam war issue and then uses them to support other issues which they did not bargain for when they joined. Such things have occurred in the past and the results have always been disastrous.”

One sharp debate on this issue took place at a 1968 national conference of the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC).^[7] Delegates of the Communist Party (CP) proposed the SMC become a “peace and freedom” group, essentially combining the antiwar and civil rights movements.

“The SMC had always taken a position against racism,” Halstead recounts. “Its main contribution to this struggle was its fight against the racist war. It did not, however, pretend that the SMC as such was a part of the leadership of the Black freedom struggle … [or] adopt as its own position any of the competing strategies for fighting racism then being argued out within the Black movement.”

Young Socialist Alliance^[8] leader Lew Jones commented: “The CP has seized on the most emotional and guilt-ridden issue in American politics. It is a crass and foolish error for a predominantly white organization to try to mechanically achieve ‘black-white unity.’ As Malcolm [X] said, there can only be such unity when first there is black unity.”

In the end, the CP proposal did not prevail. “The purpose of the Student Mobilization Committee is to fight against the racist war in Vietnam,” read a statement the conference adopted at its conclusion by an overwhelming vote.

In fact, as the antiwar movement grew, it was local committees independent of any political tendency and focused on ending the war in Vietnam that “became the backbone of the new movement,” Halstead explains.

Strategy based on confidence in the working class

The alternative to the strategies of the liberals and ultralefts was one grounded in a belief that, despite their current leadership, working people — including those in uniform — were the class with the most at stake in ending the war. The working class — mobilized alongside youth (who were always the motor force of the movement), Blacks, Chicanos, and other oppressed nationalities, and based on the unyielding determination of the Vietnamese people themselves — could get the U.S. military out of Vietnam.

In this framework supporters of mass action strove to unite the movement around periodic nationwide protests with clear demands for U.S. withdrawal, which could bring new forces into the movement as working people soured on Washington’s war. From a strategic standpoint, Halstead explains, demands focused on the slogan “Out now!” best captured growing popular sentiment and increased the chances of continuing to broaden the movement.

Halstead’s confidence in the working class shaped his belief that GIs could be won to the antiwar movement. That belief was rooted in part in his experience as an 18-year-old sailor in the South China Sea at the end of World War II.

“We knew nothing about the Chinese civil war^[9] until we found ourselves involved,” Halstead says, “and we wanted no part of it. I remember that at the time it was considered no big thing for Gls to be painting banners or turning out leaflets on military mimeograph machines, or even requisitioning space on military airplanes to attend distant meetings.”

As antiwar sentiment spread in the United States, draftees and reluctant recruits^[10] were beginning to saturate the military with antiwar ideas. Halstead knew it was “at least theoretically possible” that a “movement could develop which would have a direct effect on the war machine.”

In an article in the November 22, 1965, issue of the Militant newspaper, Halstead predicted the course the antiwar movement could take.

“It is well within possibility that not just a few hundred thousand, but millions of Americans can be actively involved in the struggle against the Vietnam war. A movement of that scope, even though centered around the single issue of the war, would have the most profound effects on every social structure in the country, including the trade unions and soldiers in the army,” Halstead explained.

“It would very probably also result in a general rise in radical consciousness on many other questions, just as it has already had an impact against red-baiting. But above all, it could be the key factor in forcing an end to the Pentagon’s genocidal war in Vietnam. The lives of untold thousands of Vietnamese men, women, and children, and U.S. G.I.’s may depend on it. That alone is reason enough to put aside sectarian differences to unite and help build a national organization which can encompass anyone willing to oppose U.S. involvement in Vietnam, regardless of their commitment, or lack of it, on other questions.”

His instincts about the widespread profound effects proved correct and prescient. In the Out Now! chapter titled “The Crumbling of U.S. Military Morale” Halstead elaborates on the impact of the antiwar movement, as well as the ongoing Black liberation struggle, on the ranks of the military, especially those on the front lines in Vietnam.

For some people, “the idea of looking to GIs as part of the antiwar constituency was considered bizarre,” Halstead explains. Others, “including Muste and Dellinger, were among the earliest to seriously consider the idea of reaching GIs.” Halstead points out that one thing the radical pacifists had in common with revolutionary socialists was “a strong faith in the capacity of ordinary people to learn and change.”

For the pacifists, choosing draft refusal or legal conscientious objector status was a moral imperative. Among the ultraleft groups, these were seen as a way to weaken the war machine. Sit-ins at draft boards, draft card burnings, and individual draft refusal were among the tactics that peppered the landscape of the movement.

Organizing GIs against the war

Revolutionary socialists, on the other hand, had a different approach. “Revolutionaries should not purposely isolate themselves from the working-class youth being drafted, enlisting under the hot breath of the draft, or already in the armed service,” Halstead explains. Because upper- and middle-class youth could more easily get deferments, Halstead notes, “those being drafted or already in the service were heavily weighted to the side of lower income working-class youth including disproportionate numbers of Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans.”

Members of Halstead’s organization who were called up, if drafted, continued to speak out and organize from within the ranks. Private First Class (PFC) Howard Petrick^[11] was one such example.

Some of the first signs of antiwar activity within the military involved Black soldiers, often initially meeting to discuss racism, but then connecting the dots to the question of the war. They knew Black GIs were fighting and dying in Vietnam disproportionately to their numbers in the population.

“The fact that liberals who supported, or did not oppose, the Johnson^[12] war policy were constantly admonishing Blacks to stick to strict nonviolence in their own struggle,” Halstead writes, “was enraging not only to the militants but to masses of ordinary Black people,” including those in uniform.

As soldiers increasingly questioned what they were doing in Vietnam, antiwar groupings emerged on U.S. military bases at home and overseas. Halstead describes the antiwar coffee houses near military bases; the growth of antiwar GI and veterans’ newspapers such as Fatigue, Vietnam GI, and the Bond; and the resistance on the front lines in Vietnam itself.

The military brass reacted with threats of jail time, demotion, and court martial. But cases such as those of Petrick, the Ford Hood Three, and the Fort Jackson Eight^[13] did not stay hidden in the shadows. The movement waged public campaigns in defense of the right of these soldiers to oppose the war and exercise free speech.

One of the myths about the Vietnam war that circulates even today is that the antiwar movement was hostile to soldiers, that antiwar activists often taunted and spat on returning GIs. Out Now! refutes that fable with unambiguous facts. By the late 1960s, most in the movement had begun to realize that it was possible, even imperative, to reach out to GIs.

Halstead describes how the October 12, 1968, “GIs and Vets March for Peace” in San Francisco drove this home. Because of attempts by military authorities to quash participation by GIs, this action received a lot of advance publicity. The turnout of 500 active-duty GIs, alongside 15,000 civilians, created “a whole new atmosphere in the Bay Area, which was a major embarkation point for Vietnam,” Halstead says. “Henceforth friendly contact between the antiwar youth and GIs who passed through was taken for granted.”

The nationally coordinated protests in the spring of 1969 deepened this understanding by explicitly identifying the actions as “GI-Civilian Demonstrations.” From that point on it was not uncommon for mass actions to be led by contingents of active-duty soldiers and veterans.

Leading a movement

Throughout the war, the clashes over questions of strategy and tactics, of political organization and perspective, sometimes resulted in unified action and sometimes not. As Halstead describes, these disputes often threatened to fracture the fragile coalition. And, in fact, by 1970, two separate national coalitions emerged and coexisted until the war’s end, in what Halstead describes as an “uneasy partnership.”

Despite these divisions, the success of the movement in unifying the “unrespectable, ‘irrelevant,’ and by no means homogeneous band” that took up the banner in the early 1960s, can be attributed in part to the unwavering commitment of many of its leaders to that unity. Leaders who knew when to compromise without abandoning their principles.

More than once, Halstead refers to A.J. Muste’s example. In a dispute, Muste “would state his own position and seek to convince others of it, but he never cut off relations or expressed anger with anyone because they didn’t agree with him,” Halstead notes. “He would listen carefully to the other side’s argument, find the logic in it, then try to find a point where there was agreement and work together on that, biding his time for movement in his direction on other matters.”

Muste died in February 1967. But “he had lived long enough to play a crucial role in unifying and broadening the antiwar movement while working to maintain its radical thrust, its ability to cut away at the root of the problem,” Halstead explains.

Yet among that era’s leaders, including its younger activists, one example of an exceptional leader Halstead does not explicitly note — but that stands out throughout his account of conference disputes and street confrontations — is himself.

Steeped in decades of working-class struggle and revolutionary Marxist tradition, Halstead’s instincts and leadership qualities enabled him to accept political differences, listen to others, and appreciate what others brought to the table. He knew and acted on the understanding that in a genuine coalition or united front effort compromise was often necessary to maintain unity in action. In addition, Halstead was not shy about admitting his own mistakes and using them as examples of what not to do.

Because of Halstead, ‘the war ended sooner’

In response to news of Halstead’s death in 1988, many messages arrived from those with whom he had collaborated, argued, and yet found common ground. David McReynolds, chairman of the War Resisters’ League International and a leading radical pacifist, had this to say:

“History can judge the value of Fred’s work with the SWP, but history has already judged the value of his work during the Vietnam period. Because of Fred Halstead, the Vietnam War ended sooner. There are Vietnamese children alive today because of his work, just as there are working-class Americans who got home earlier — or were not drafted at all — because of his work.

“He contributed richly to the history of that period by the careful and useful book he wrote,” McReynolds continued. “He has continued to contribute: the ability of the people of Nicaragua^[14] to have a chance to work out their own problems without an actual U.S. military invasion is a reflection of what many of us together did during Vietnam. And of those many, Fred Halstead was of unique and special value. Those of us who knew him have lost a friend and a trusted coworker.”

Of all Halstead’s gifts, perhaps the most important, is the lesson of keeping one’s eyes on the masses of working people and the oppressed.

After a May 9, 1970, antiwar demonstration of 100,000, Dellinger and other radical pacifists harshly criticized such actions as “self-perpetuating activities which fail to prepare people for more militant forms of resistance.” They blamed the marshals, including Halstead, for allegedly preventing massive civil disobedience.

“The purpose of these mass demonstrations is not to provide catharsis for frustrated ‘radicals’ who have not yet learned that to stop this war, or to make any fundamental change, much less a revolution, you must involve immense masses,” Halstead responded. “Nor is the purpose of such demonstrations to provide victims for additional examples of ruling-class violence. Their purpose is to provide a visible form in which dissent on the war can manifest itself; and to provide a form whereby new sections of the population can become involved.”

Beyond the Vietnam War, Halstead knew that this was where revolutionists needed to look in the future to bring imperialism to its knees. As a student of the Russian Revolution, he recognized that it would take mass mobilization of not just millions — as happened during Vietnam — but millions upon millions, to accomplish this task. To the end of his life, Halstead remained convinced that a socialist revolution was possible in the United States.

It may be difficult, a half-century later, to appreciate the lasting impact of the anti-Vietnam war movement. But Halstead’s closing words in Out Now! ring as true today as they did when the war ended in 1975.

“The American movement against the Vietnam War knocked a gaping hole in the theory that because of its control over the military, the police, the economy, and the tremendously effective modern media, the ruling class could get away with anything so long as there was some degree of prosperity. The antiwar movement started with nothing but leaflets. But it proved that people can think for themselves if the issue touches them deeply enough, technology notwithstanding.

“In human affairs there is still nothing so powerful as an idea and a movement whose time has come.”

NOTES

[1] From the late 1940s through the 1950s, a witch hunt characterized by persecution of left-wing individuals and others, and fearmongering about communist and Soviet influence, dominated the U.S. political scene. One of the first official acts driving this anti-communist campaign was a 1947 executive order by then U.S. president Harry Truman requiring “loyalty” screening for civil servants.

Subsequently, U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, escalated this campaign. “McCarthyism was the most virulent expression of the cold-war witch-hunt period,” explains What Is American Fascism? Writings on Father Coughlin, Mayor Frank Hague, and Senator Joseph McCarthy by socialist leaders James P. Cannon and Joseph Hansen (p. 22). “Joseph R. McCarthy was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1946 with the support of the Communist Party and liberal organizations. In 1950, he suddenly emerged as the extreme exponent of the anti-communist witch-hunt then being carried out by the Truman administration.

“He whipped up widespread middle-class and even working-class support which charged that the State Department was Communist-infiltrated, that ‘Communists’ in high office had deliberately ‘lost’ China, and that the American political ‘elite’ was betraying the country to the ‘Communists.’ Coming into conflict with the top leaders of both capitalist parties and even with the U.S. Army, while spreading terror among socialists, labor militants, and liberals, McCarthy’s movement clearly evinced fascist characteristics.

“McCarthyism reached its peak during and immediately after the Korean war, when World War III was widely expected at any moment. With the turn away from head-on confrontation with the Soviet Union and the extension of prosperity into peacetime, McCarthy rapidly lost support and was deserted by his allies in the Republican Party. He was censured by the Senate in 1954 and died in 1957.

“Today, the term ‘McCarthyism’ is commonly used to describe all forms of the anticommunist witch-hunt of the post-World-War-Two period, as well as the incipient fascist development spearheaded by the Wisconsin senator.”

[2] The Montgomery bus boycott, sparked in December 1955 by the refusal of Rosa Parks to yield her seat on a city bus to a white woman, was a pivotal event in the civil rights movement. The boycott ended a year later after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated buses were unconstitutional took effect.

[3] In 1959, rebel forces in Cuba overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, opening the road to socialism in the Americas. As U.S. hostility toward Cuba intensified, the Fair Play for Cuba committee organized educational activities and protests against intervention. It set the precedent for united activity among forces in the United States that had been at odds for years. “This was, in a very real sense, an antiwar movement, but one the old peace movement refused to endorse,” Halstead writes.

[4] The Mobilizer was the newsletter of the Spring Mobilization Committee, the national formation that called and organized the mass demonstrations of April 15, 1967. The New York City action, estimated by organizers at 400,000 people, was the largest single march of any kind in the United States up to that time.

[5] The Paris Peace Talks were a series of diplomatic meetings held between 1968 and 1973 between the United States, North Vietnam, the National Liberation Front, and the U.S.-back Saigon regime. They concluded with the January 1973 signing of peace accords that ended direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. A little over two years later the remaining U.S. forces beat a hasty, disorganized retreat when North Vietnamese and NLF forces overthrew the puppet government in Saigon on April 30, 1975, and won the war.

[6] Founded in 1960, the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam was the political and military organization that fought alongside North Vietnamese for an end to Saigon’s dictatorial regime and for unification of the country.

[7] The Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam emerged at the end of 1966 and remained the antiwar movement’s main youth organization until the end of the war.

[8] The Young Socialist Alliance was the youth organization associated with the Socialist Workers Party.

[9] Following World War II, Washington heavily supported Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime against communist forces led by Mao Zedong during the Chinese civil war (1945–1949), providing billions in financial aid, military equipment, and logistical support to the Nationalists.

[10] During the Vietnam War, many enlisted in the armed forces for economic reasons, as an alternative to imprisonment for alleged crimes, or, in the face of the draft, to have some choice of military service other than the Army infantry.

[11] In the summer of 1966, Howard Petrick — a young antiwar activist and socialist — was drafted into the U.S. Army. When he arrived for basic training, dissent was brewing in the military about the war. The military brass tried to isolate and discipline soldiers who spoke out against the war. Petrick was among those singled out and, in 1968, given an “undesirable” discharge. An interview with Petrick about these events appears here.

[12] Lyndon B. Johnson became U.S. president in November 1963 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In one campaign speech Johnson declared, “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” However, in August 1964, based on allegations that Vietnamese torpedo boats had fired on two U.S. destroyers, Johnson pushed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through Congress, granting him broad powers that were used as the authority for massive escalations over the next four years.

Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, was elected president in 1968, promising: “I pledge to you that we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.” He, too, sharply escalated the war.

[13] In June 1966, Private First Class (PFC) James Johnson, Pvt. David Samas, and Pvt. Dennis Mora, all stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, made public their intent to refuse to board a ship to Vietnam after receiving orders to report to Oakland, California, for deployment. The movement helped build support for their case. All three were ultimately convicted of refusing orders and served three years in prison.

In March 1969, eight privates stationed at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, were arrested on charges stemming from an impromptu meeting of more than 100 GIs outside their barracks. The men had committed no crimes or violated any orders. They had simply spoken out against the war. Under public pressure stemming from efforts by the antiwar movement, the army dropped the charges and — after 60 days in the stockade — the last of them was released.

[14] Following the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, the new Sandinista government was faced with armed insurgency by counterrevolutionary bandits, known as the Contras, until 1990. Washington backed the Contras financially and militarily, but that support did not metastasize to direct intervention by U.S. troops.

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