Key Lessons from the Movement in U.S. Against 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 main 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.

As new imperialist wars shake the stability of the capitalist system, all 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.” (The full introduction to this post can be found in Part I.)

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 second of which follows.

— World-Outlook editors

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Out Now! Excerpts from ‘Afterword’ – Part 2

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

By Fred Halstead

In the beginning, the movement came to grips with three internal policy problems that were interconnected: red-baiting, non-exclusion, and democratic decision-making.

Red baiting, non-exclusion, and democratic decision-making

Red-baiting had to be cleared away so that Marxists and revolutionaries of any persuasion would not be barred from openly participating on an equal footing in all the movement’s activities and on its leading bodies. This was a vital part of positioning the movement to stand up to the inevitable barrage of red-baiting from the war-makers and combatting the anticommunist hysteria on which toleration of the war itself was psychologically based. Red-baiting was explicitly rejected and frowned upon early in the movement’s development. It had to be so for any concerted efforts to go forward at all. Although this bugaboo cropped up now and then, it never again caught on.

This openness to the left involved a break with the cold-war, anticommunist ideology that had saturated the fabric of American thought since shortly after World War II. The antiwar movement took this head-on with the acknowledgment that every shade of opinion had full citizenship rights within it and none were to be penalized for their political affiliations or views. This percolated through wider and wider circles until eventually the way of thinking in the country was significantly altered.

The setback given to red-baiting was one of the outstanding achievements of the antiwar movement.

This was all the more remarkable considering that “the enemy” was Communist-led and backed by the Soviet Union and China. Under the circumstances it might well have been expected that new waves of anticommunist vehemence would easily have been stirred up. Yet the attempts to do so met with little response and had minimal effect. The same was true of efforts by the jingoistic forces to mount prowar, anticommunist demonstrations. The revulsion against the war proved more powerful than the anti-communist tirades and the pseudopatriotic demagogy.

The policy of non-exclusion came into effect along with the rejection of red-baiting. No “loyalty oaths” were demanded or restrictions imposed on anyone opposed to the war on any grounds. The sole requirement was a readiness to protest and act against the war. This rule had to be enforced on two fronts. Certain skittish moderates tried to bar the left or ultralefts from the coalitions. On the other hand, some sectarian groups clamored for the expulsion of liberal politicians and figures who were willing to join in common action within the framework of the antiwar protests. The movement would not have grown as it did and drawn millions into activity unless it had abided by the principle of nonexclusion.

The procedure of democratic decision-making was best exemplified at the periodic national and regional antiwar conferences, open to all. There the issues were publicly debated and reported. These were also important arenas for the presentation and exchange of ideas on a wide variety of issues. Any group was welcome to set up literature tables, distribute circulars, hold workshops, and so on. There were those — like Dave Dellinger^[1] — who disparaged parliamentary debate and large decision-making bodies and preferred small gatherings of selected leaders. Even these were never secret but were open to observers and publicly reported. The mainstream antiwar movement conducted its affairs and arrived at its proposals for action in a goldfish bowl.

By contrast, the Washington war-makers made their decisions behind the backs and without the concurrence of the people.

(…)

The conspirators were seated in power in Washington, while the antiwar movement planned its activities in front of the masses. This did not prevent the government from indicting movement personalities on charges of conspiracy. Though none of the major trials were won by the prosecutors after appeal, they exacted a heavy toll from the individual defendants and taxed the resources of the movement.

In addition, the authorities resorted to the types of repression very inadequately described in the preceding chapters. It would take another volume to outline the victimizations, break-ins, thefts, illegal surveillance, provocations, including violent ones, FBI-fabricated forgeries designed to foment hostility between groups and individuals, arrests, jailings, frame-ups, beatings, kidnappings, shootings, court-martials, bad-conduct discharges, and assorted “dirty tricks” that were used against the antiwar forces — and not just under Nixon. The antiwar movement was “Watergated” from the beginning, and with a vengeance.^[2]

Lack of violence: noteworthy feature of antiwar movement

In the face of all this, and in light of the entirely justified and extreme anger against the war-makers, the lack of violence on the part of the antiwar movement in the United States is among its noteworthy features. Indeed, its record in this respect is exceptional in the history of social upheavals in the United States. Throughout, the mainstream of the movement rejected violent confrontation as a tactic for the antiwar forces and effectively combatted any tendency along that line.

(…)

For eight of the fifteen years of the war the antiwar movement engaged in continuous street actions one place or another across the country. Yet through the entire fifteen years, while the U.S. government was killing hundreds of thousands in Indochina, not a single person was killed by antiwar demonstrators in the United States.

Equally important was the fact that the killings of antiwar activists by the authorities — an ever-present danger — were held to a minimum because of the policy of keeping the onus for violence upon the war-makers and their servitors.

Though the makings for violent clashes were present in every major demonstration, they were consciously counteracted by the organizers and usually fizzled out in minor scuffles and “trashings.” Even in the wing of the movement that went in for confrontation, tactical nonviolence was generally adhered to, largely upon the insistence of the pacifists. While such demonstrations were sometimes stormy, the lethal weapons were in the hands of the police, and the injured were almost always protesters.

Even the handfuls who advocated terrorism and excluded themselves from the mainstream antiwar movement over this issue were sufficiently affected by the predominant spirit to confine their bombings to empty buildings or statues. In one case such a group allegedly set off a bomb in an installation connected with military research at the University of Wisconsin that exploded and killed an antiwar graduate student who was unexpectedly in the building. Aside from this incident, members of these groups killed only themselves, in accidental explosions.

Of course, in the war zone itself it was a different story. There the Pentagon had a total monopoly on setting the tone, teaching the methods, and providing the means. Some of the outraged, and desperate Gls whom the brass had urged to kill, used the weapons at hand to slay and terrorize their own officers to avoid dying themselves or slaughtering Vietnamese in their own land. No more need be said.

Success in competing with Establishment for allegiance of youth

The mass antiwar movement was first of all a generational phenomenon, since the youth were being drafted and doing the fighting and dying. This was its most urgent aspect. The movement competed with the Establishment for the allegiance of the American youth. The government had to conscript them or force their enlistment under the hot breath of the draft. The movement gained their voluntary participation and backing by appealing to their sense of self-preservation, consciences, and deep convictions. It won this contest hands down, and as more and more youth entered the armed forces they carried with them the ferment of antiwar ideas.

Although many were the beneficiaries of draft deferments, college students, and occasionally those from the high schools, formed the core of almost all the mass actions from the SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] sponsored march on Washington in 1965 to the second counter-inaugural in January 1973. The campuses from coast to coast served as the bases and main organizing centers of the movement. College students were able to play such a distinctive role for the first time in American history partly because of the immense expansion of higher education following World War II, when their numbers grew to over eight million by the early seventies.

(…)

The movement did not proceed at an even rate but experienced ebbs and flows. Its pace was determined not by the will of the participants, but by the tempo of major political and military events. Activity slackened during national election periods and picked up momentum with each new turn in the military situation and important policy pronouncements in Washington.

The seasonal weather in Indochina — which dictated the timing of military offensives — happened to coincide with the college semesters in this country so that the major military moves in Indochina tended to come when colleges were in full session. Thus the largest mobilizations took place in the spring or in the fall of an off-election year.

The four greatest upsurges occurred around April 15, 1967; October 15 – November 15, 1969; early May, 1970; and April 24, 1971. The organizers of the antiwar movement had to take this uneven rhythm of the mass movement into account and were liable to commit bad mistakes if their judgments were wrong, as they sometimes were.

Not a few well-intentioned people kept declaring from 1965 on that the movement was ephemeral and had passed its peak.

(…)

The genuine grassroots character of the movement

There could be no doubt about the genuine grassroots character of the movement. The FBI and the CIA were never able to produce a shred of evidence about foreign subsidies or manipulation, for the simple reason that there weren’t any. The movement was based on the indignation of millions of Americans against the unjust, immoral, undeclared war and appealed to their sense of justice and decency. It had no official patronage. It had to be built from scratch and was maintained, somewhat haphazardly, by volunteers working for nothing or for bare subsistence. It was skimpily financed by contributions, large and small, from sympathizers and collections at rallies.

The coalitions often teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, warding off bill collectors from day to day. Hundreds and probably thousands of individuals made substantial loans without collateral, knowing they might never be repaid, and often accepted partial or no repayment with good grace for the sake of the cause.

The authorities tried to choke off financial aid by intimidating donors….

Whereas the corporations raked in billions in direct profits from military appropriations, no one got anything but poorer out of participating in the opposition. Tens of thousands of activists made heavy sacrifices of time, money, and energy to keep it going. Perhaps it’s just as well, for there was no ‘room for careerism or privilege to get a foothold in a movement of this kind.

(…)

In 1965 and earlier it was not at all evident that Vietnam would bulk so large in American life and become the overriding issue in its politics. The SWP [Socialist Workers Party — the revolutionary party of which Halstead was a leader] did not foresee this, but it did not commit the mistake of underrating the war’s importance. It considered that as a revolutionary socialist organization it had an internationalist obligation to do all it could to combat its own government’s attempt to crush a colonial revolution. It was this Leninist guideline that put the SWP on the right track from the beginning.

Moreover, in accordance with its orthodox Marxist class-struggle approach the SWP was oriented from the beginning toward winning sympathy for the antiwar movement among workers and Gls.

(…)

The absence of more extensive labor participation did give greater scope to the projects of the anarchistically inclined, the ultralefts, and other petty-bourgeois radicals. In face of this it was a considerable accomplishment that the firm stand of the SWP and others did prevent the antiwar movement — which was amorphous in belief and multiclass in composition and direction — from either being submerged in bourgeois electoral machinations or setting up barriers to the participation of ordinary Americans eager to register their opposition to the war. The SWP was sharply criticized for insisting that the coalitions center their activities around the single issue of ending the U.S. presence in Vietnam, formulated most succinctly in “Out Now.” It held fast to this position because that aim was imperative and important enough in and of itself to warrant the utmost concentration upon its fulfillment.

The movement was a united front of a special type, not between mass organizations of the working class for a concrete set of demands, but between diverse and multiclass elements whose sole bond of unity was to oppose the war. It had to confine itself to implementing actions around that central purpose in order to hold together. It could not have become a political party, as some wished, that could develop a program or set about to solve the fundamental problems of American society, not to mention bidding for state power. All that was beyond its capacities because of its class composition and heterogeneous character. The components of the movement, let alone the average American, were not ready to take unified action on a host of other questions, no matter how important. Despite repeated attempts along that line, only the specifically antiwar protests involved masses of that size.

(…)

It is too early to assess the full consequences of this experience. It is nonetheless clear that the antiwar agitation and mass mobilizations spurred the radicalization of many sectors of the population. “It is no accident,” wrote Susan Jacoby for one, “that so many female veterans of the civil-rights movement and the antiwar movement ultimately became involved in the women’s liberation movement.”

It changed the political face of the United States and motivated a healthy distrust of the rulers in Washington that bore fruit in the Watergate revelations and their sequels.

It broke the fever of the anticommunist hysteria and weakened the efficacy of the “red scares” that have been used as a weapon against any challenge to the status quo.

It challenged and changed the stereotyped image of Gls as obedient pawns of the brass immunized against dissenting currents within the civilian population.

The abhorrence of any further military ventures abroad has restricted the options available to Washington in its imperial designs, as its dilemma over Angola in 1976 indicated.

The American movement against the Vietnam War broke the pattern of large and successful movements for social reform in the United States confining themselves to domestic matters and accepting uncritically the imperialist foreign policy, aggressive wars, and counterrevolutionary ventures of the American Establishment.

All this cannot but be reflected in future struggles for social progress within the United States and internationally. 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.

In any case, the veterans of the antiwar movement have every reason to be proud of their record, part of which is set down in this book. We accomplished what we had set out to do. Our protests did win over public opinion and exert enough pressure — along with that of the Vietnamese — to bring the U.S. forces home. That done, the Vietnamese were finally able to take over their own country.

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.

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

NOTES

[1] David Dellinger, a radical pacifist and anarchist, was among the central figures in the U.S. movement against the Vietnam War.

[2] “Watergate” was a political scandal in the United States involving the administration of U.S. president Richard Nixon, a Republican. On June 17, 1972, operatives associated with Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign were caught burglarizing and planting listening devices in the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Washington, D.C.’s Watergate complex. Nixon’s efforts to conceal his administration’s involvement led to an impeachment process and his resignation in August 1974.

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