Key Lessons from the Movement in the U.S. to End the Vietnam War

In the “Afterword” to Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the U.S. to End the Vietnam War, author Fred Halstead summarized the central challenges of building this movement, the key characteristics that allowed it to involve millions — including within the U.S. military, and its significance in the 1975 defeat of Washington’s war machine in Southeast Asia.

“It is too early to assess the full consequences of this experience,” Halstead wrote three years after that defeat. He noted, however, that the antiwar movement “changed the political face of the United States” and “broke the fever of the anticommunist hysteria,” a holdover of the Cold War era. It “challenged and changed the stereotyped image of Gls” as immune from dissent within the civilian population and broke the pattern of social movements in the United States confining themselves to domestic matters.

The antiwar movement fostered a deep-going abhorrence among a majority of the U.S. population of further such military adventures. It restricted, for example, the U.S. government from using its military alongside the racist apartheid regime in South Africa that invaded Angola after that country’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1976.

“All this cannot but be reflected in future struggles for social progress within the United States and internationally,” Halstead said. “It is even possible that the antiwar movement will prove to have been in a number of aspects a rehearsal for the coming American socialist revolution.”

The latter prediction has not materialized. About a half century later, we are far from seeing the kinds of changes that could even pose the possibility of a socialist revolution in the United States down the road. Instead, the working class and labor movement in the U.S. and internationally have lived through decades of retreat.

But the impact of the anti-Vietnam war movement can still be felt. In its recent editorial on the blow Washington suffered in the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, World-Outlook noted, “The Vietnam Syndrome is still alive.” To this day, the Pentagon’s ability to put “boots on the ground” to further the U.S. rulers’ interests around the world is hampered by domestic public opinion.

As new imperialist wars shake the stability of the capitalist system, new generations seeking social justice will be better equipped to face today’s challenges by studying the lessons outlined in Out Now! — succinctly summarized in the book’s “Afterword.”

In this spirit, we are publishing below excerpts from that “Afterword” for the information of our readers. The text is from the original. Subheadings, photos, and notes are by World-Outlook. Due to their length, we are publishing the excerpts in two parts, the first of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

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Out Now! Excerpts from ‘Afterword’ – Part 1

(This is the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

By Fred Halstead

The Second Indochina War was the first in the epoch of American imperialism in which the United States went down to defeat. After emerging victorious from the Spanish-American War and two world wars, then encountering a stalemate in Korea, the Pentagon’s military machine was ignominiously evicted from Vietnam, thanks to the persevering struggle of the Indochinese plus the antiwar resistance of the American people. This was the most sustained and, except for Russia in 1905 and 1917,^[1] the most effective antiwar movement within any big power while the shooting was going on.

The official propagandists cooked up various formulas to justify their military intervention. It was depicted as a crusade for democracy and freedom against the threat of communist totalitarianism and for the defense of the independence of the South against invasion from the North. The U.S. was there, it was said, to fulfill treaty obligations to the client Saigon regime and thwart the expansionism of China and the Soviet Union. Toward the end the excuses became exceedingly thin: to assure the return of the POWs [prisoners of war]; to prevent a bloodbath in the South if the NLF [National Liberation Front]^[2] should take over completely; to protect U.S. troops as they were withdrawn. All this was demagogy.

In reality, U.S. intervention had a thoroughly imperialistic character. The colossus of world capitalism hurled its military might without provocation against a small and divided colonial nation thousands of miles away struggling for self-determination and unification. A series of American presidents sought to do what King George III’s empire failed to do against the rebel patriots of 1776.^[3]

On one side was a state armed to the teeth promoting the strategic aims and material interests of the corporate rich on the global arena; on the other was a worker and peasant uprising heading toward the overthrow of capitalist power and property, despite the limited political program of its leadership.

These underlying anticapitalist and anti-landlord tendencies were eventually clearly expressed in the reunification of Vietnam in 1976 and the process of eliminating capitalist property relations in the South. The prolonged civil war in South Vietnam thereby proved to be an integral part of the international confrontation between the upholders of capitalism and the forces moving in a socialist direction that has been unfolding since the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution.

Apart from genocide against the Native Americans, which involved intermittent warfare over four centuries, this was the longest war in America’s history. The first U.S. soldier was reported killed in Vietnam in 1959, the last in 1975, a span of sixteen years. (The Revolutionary War lasted eight years and the Spanish-American War only four months.)^[4]

According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the total number of American military personnel engaged at one time or another in the Southeast Asian war — including bases in Thailand and elsewhere and on ships at sea – was over eight million. This was more than half the number of Americans engaged in World War II (8,744,000 compared with 16,112,566). Over three million Americans were sent to Vietnam itself. Sixty thousand were killed, 46,000 of these in combat; and 300,000 were wounded. (The ratio of seriously wounded and permanently disabled to killed, incidentally, was much higher among Americans in Vietnam than in previous wars, owing largely to advanced techniques of removing casualties quickly to hospitals.)

The Indochinese were killed in the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, and their lands devastated. The Pentagon dropped more bomb tonnage on the relatively small area of Indochina than had been dropped anywhere in the world in all previous wars combined.

The direct dollar cost to the U.S. in South Vietnam alone was $141 billion. This was more than $7,000 for each of the area’s 20 million inhabitants, whose per capita income was only $157 per year. The collateral expenditures amounted to far more. Economists correctly link the rapid inflation of the late 1960s to the large federal deficits resulting from U.S. spending for the Vietnam War.

Most Americans today regard this as a colossal waste of lives and wealth in a shameful war. But the Pentagon strategists make a different assessment. To be sure, they did not cover themselves with glory or succeed in crushing the Vietnamese revolution and retaining a staging area for U.S. operations in the region. But they did hold back the advancement of the colonial revolution in Vietnam for a decade and a half. That was part of their job of policing the world for American big business, its multinational companies, and its clients in Japan and elsewhere.

Early days of the war

In the early sixties the vast majority of Americans ignored the war, or accommodated themselves to it, though without much patriotic fervor. It seemed remote from their immediate concerns, something which they knew little or nothing about and left trustingly to their government. That was still a time of confidence in the wisdom and honesty of the top political leaders and above all in the benevolent intentions of the occupants of the White House. The Washington policy makers took cruel advantage of this naivete.

Without exaggeration, most Americans were hardly aware that Vietnam existed when the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations were stealthily pulling them step by step into the bloody quagmire. The Democrats and Republicans jointly carried out the “bipartisan foreign policy” in Southeast Asia and rubber-stamped it in Congress while the major media that molded public opinion – and kept it uninformed – gave no warning of what was ahead.

The antiwar movement began with people who were already radicalized: pacifists, socialists, communists, rebellious students, and a scattering of morally outraged individuals. At the start these were a small minority, convinced of the justness of their cause and ready to face unpopularity for their stand. The energy, resoluteness, and fortitude of this vanguard brought the movement into being and remained its prime mover.

The most paradoxical aspect of this profound and unforgettable chapter of American history was the central and decisive role played by the left-wing elements, which included the radical pacifists. When it began, it was almost unthinkable that they could set in motion and head a movement of such vast scope. They themselves did not really expect such a development. They just felt obliged to do whatever they could.

At the beginning of the sixties the American left — old and new — was looked upon as an esoteric fringe with virtually negligible influence. So far as numbers in radical organizations were concerned, this was close to the truth. The cold war and the witch-hunting atmosphere,^[5] in conjunction with the prolonged prosperity of the 1950s, had decimated their ranks. Even after their numbers increased manyfold during the sixties and early seventies, the tens of thousands directly supporting the various radical groupings were not very large compared to the entire population.

Yet this unrespectable, “irrelevant,” and by no means homogeneous band became “the saving remnant” as it moved into the vacancy left by the established educational, religious, labor union, journalistic, and political institutions. These were tied in with the two-party system and went along with the generals and the State Department, supporting a perfectly obviously illegal and unjust war to one extent or another.

On closer examination this is not so surprising. For only those who were prepared ideologically to defy pervasive, blind conformity could take the risk of overt opposition. If the number of such Americans was so small in the early sixties, this testified less to the irrelevance of the radicals than to the marginal place that deepgoing criticism occupied under the profound corruption and advanced senility of the two-party system.

The movement later made its impact upon that system, as the proliferation of dove Democrats and Republicans showed. But the dove politicians didn’t lead, they followed, far behind, stumbling and mumbling all the way. There has since been some deft distorting of the record on this point, but the attempted rehabilitation is belied by the facts.

Only two senators, Morse and Gruening, voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution which gave Johnson the green light in 1964.^[6] A single member of the House, Adam Clayton Powell, registered some sort of dissent by abstaining. Others knew something was wrong. But they were also aware that to avoid “irrelevance” within the two-party system you don’t go around offending the powers-that-be and challenging “reasons of state” on grounds of human decency or anything of that sort. Morse, Gruening, and Powell were all knifed by their national party leadership and never won another election. Even after the dramatic switch in the public attitude made dovishness permissible on Capitol Hill, the vast majority in both parties — doves included — consistently voted for the Vietnam military budget up to 1973.

Insofar as the Democratic and Republican doves contributed to the spread of antiwar sentiment — and some of them did by lending their authority occasionally to antiwar activities, publicizing certain facts about the war, and so on — their activities were contradicted by their steering people toward the two parties that supported the war and by their effective votes in Congress.

The issue was not resolved, or even ameliorated, through the two-party electoral process. On the contrary, the election periods were used to precisely the opposite effect. They served to hood-wink the antiwar feelings, defuse antiwar protests, and give the war-makers some extra maneuverability in their pernicious and ill-fated plans. That happened with every congressional and presidential election from 1964, when Johnson ran as a “peace” candidate, to 1972, when the Nixon administration announced that “peace is at hand” and then, after the election, went ahead with another “brutalization” of the Vietnamese population.

Those who retain or preach faith in the reformability of the capitalist two-party system must reckon with the fact that the American movement against the Vietnam War – the greatest moral resurgence in the U.S. since the struggle to abolish slavery – had to arise and maintain itself apart from and in defiance of both parties.

Beyond their agreement in opposing the war, the initiators of the movement held discordant views on many matters and advocated different, and even conflicting, methods. At every point along the road, they had to thrash out their principled strategic and tactical differences in order to arrive at unified and concerted action. This was rarely easy and not always possible. It was necessary to reestablish a tradition of toleration for differences of opinion and a taboo on vitriolic and slanderous polemic. These amenities had been absent for decades in relations between American left-wing groups, ever since the destruction of the old tradition by the Stalinized Communist Party. The tone set by the radical pacifists influenced by A. J. Muste^[7] played a salutary role in this respect.

At times some of the latter, however, were uncomfortable with serious polemic itself and downright appalled by the parliamentary maneuvering — however open, aboveboard, and by-the-rules it was — that inevitably attends purposeful debate where disputed questions have to be settled one way or another. But the clash of ideas, and the deliberate efforts to convince people to take sides, was inevitable and essential for practical decision. No amount of “love and trust” would either eliminate or substitute for this contest. The alternative was to leave decisions to prophets and saints, which none of us were.

(This was the first of two parts. The second can be found in Part II.)

NOTES

[1] In January 1905, revolution broke out in Russia, leading to the establishment of a constitutional monarchy. The revolution was characterized by mass political and social unrest including workers’ strikes, peasant revolts, and military mutinies directed against Tsar Nicholas II and his autocracy.

In 1917, as the first World War raged, the workers and peasants of Russia carried out a mighty revolution, overthrowing the stranglehold of the tsarist regime and semi-feudal class relations. Under the leadership of the Bolshevik party, they carried out the first successful socialist revolution, which contributed to the end of the first world inter-imperialist slaughter.

[2] 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.

[3] This is a reference to the first American Revolution (1775-1783), when colonists successfully rebelled against British rule. King George III was the reigning crown at the time.

[4] Since the publication of Out Now! the U.S. war in Afghanistan has replaced Vietnam as the longest of Washington’s wars, lasting nearly 20 years. The conflict began on October 7, 2001, and officially ended on August 30, 2021, spanning four different U.S. presidencies.

[5] 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.”

[6] 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.

[7] For more information see A.J. Muste: The Radical Pacifist Who Played An ‘Irreplaceable Role in Anti-Vietnam War Movement’.

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