Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Independent Student Newspaper Since 1969

The Badger Herald

Advertisements
Advertisements

Vietnam 101: Lessons on ending wars

Activists opposing the war in Iraq today should take a page from our predecessors ? the students, soldiers, Americans and Vietnamese who stopped the war in Vietnam.

It took a massive movement domestically to begin to shake America?s political leaders. In late 1969, a series of protests known as the Moratorium Days involved millions in protest. On Oct. 15, some 10 million people took part in local actions across the country. A month later, Washington, D.C., was the site of the largest demonstration in U.S. history to that point ? nearly 750,000 protesters jammed around the Washington Monument.

The media reported President Richard Nixon paid the protesters no attention whatsoever and spent the afternoon watching football. However, history books later revealed a different story. Nixon was frantic about the size of the 1969 mobilizations.?The demonstrators had been more successful than they realized, pushing Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger away from plans to greatly escalate the war, possibly even to the point of using nuclear weapons,? author Gerald Nicosia wrote in ?Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans? Movement.?

Advertisements

A few months later, college campuses across the United States went into open rebellion. In response, the National Guard was mobilized to put down the protests, leading to the killings of four students at Kent State May 4 and two students at historically black Jackson State May 14-15. However, the attempt to use naked force to repress student protests failed. In all, roughly 8 million students participated in student strikes. ?Faculty and administrators joined students in active dissent and 536 campuses were shut down completely, 51 for the rest of the academic year,? according to ?The War Within: America?s Battle Over Vietnam? by Tom Wells. The scale of the protests prodded McGeorge Bundy, one of the war?s principal architects, to declare that ?not only must there be no new incursion of Americans across the Cambodian border, but nothing that feels like that to the American public must happen again, on the president?s say-so alone.?

The next year, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War burst onto the national anti-war scene. Warmly embraced by the anti-war movement, the veterans were still frustrated by the inattention paid them by the mainstream media and Washington politicians.

Thus was born the idea for Operation Dewey Canyon III: A Limited Incursion into the Country of Congress (Dewey Canyon I and II were code names for secret incursions into Laos), a week of actions in Washington timed to coincide with an anti-war mobilization in D.C. Sat., April 24. About 1,000 VVAW members camped out on the National Mall, held sit-ins at the Supreme Court and participated in guerrilla theater.

The VVAW searched in vain for a member of Congress who would accept the medals they wanted to return as a symbol of their disillusionment with the cause of war in

Vietnam. The police, however, would let the veterans nowhere near the Capitol, erecting a giant fence to keep them out. And thus was born one of the most enduring images of the Vietnam anti-war movement ? veterans tossing their medals over a fence at the Capitol building. The next day, 500,000 protesters swarmed the Mall for one of the mega-marches of the period. In subsequent months, several thousand veterans joined the VVAW.

It took years to reach this apex of anti-war struggle, and several elements combined to produce this outcome. By early 1970, there had been more than a decade of civil rights organizing, giving anti-war activists the positive example that mass mobilization and grassroots organizing are a necessary part of a strategy to win change. The 1968 Tet Offensive turned on its head the official U.S. version of the war as a success waiting to happen. After Tet, it was widely accepted that the outcome would be a defeat ? how soon was the only question. But it took several more years to force the U.S. political establishment to stop trying to impose its will militarily and accept defeat. And along the way, activists still had to learn several important lessons ? for example, that political leaders may pledge to end the war, such as Richard Nixon?s campaign promise that he had a ?secret plan? to end the war, to buy time so they can pursue further military operations.

On their own, even the massive protests of 1970 didn?t produce the change that activists sought. As anti-war activist Eric Ruder has argued, ?Three necessary elements came together ? with each one bolstering and reinforcing the others ? to end the U.S. war on Vietnam. The Vietnamese resistance kept the United States from imposing its will, but couldn?t expel the United States on its own. The rise of resistance among U.S. soldiers undermined the effectiveness of the U.S. military as a fighting force, but GI organizing didn?t happen in a vacuum. The anti-war movement in the United States shook up American society, but it didn?t have the power [on its own] to stop the war machine.?

In conjunction, however, those three elements forced the world?s most powerful empire to cease one of its conquests.

Here?s to a repeat.

Paul Heideman ([email protected])is a graduate student in Afro-American studies and a member of the International Socialist Organization.

Advertisements
Leave a Comment
Donate to The Badger Herald

Your donation will support the student journalists of University of Wisconsin-Madison. Your contribution will allow us to purchase equipment and cover our annual website hosting costs.

More to Discover
Donate to The Badger Herald

Comments (0)

All The Badger Herald Picks Reader Picks Sort: Newest

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *