3 - Young2017

2
The Vietnam War as a World Event

m a r i l y n b. y o u n g a n d s o p h i e qu i n n - ju d g e
At its center, the Vietnam War involved three countries outside Vietnam
itself: China, the Soviet Union and the United States. If one widens the lens
there were many more: the Indochinese neighbors who were drawn into the
fray, Cambodia and Laos; the allies who sent ground troops (in varying
numbers) – South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Britain,
Thailand and Taiwan on the US side; some Soviet and many more Chinese
anti-aircraft troops – around 320,000 in all – supporting Hanoi. Pull back still
more and one can include the countries from whose US bases the military
flew its hundreds of thousands of bombing missions, or refueled its aircraft
carriers, or offered weary troops “rest and recreation”: above all Thailand,
but also the Philippines, Japan (in particular, Okinawa) and South Korea. Add
to these countries such as Canada, which were important suppliers of war
material, and the war widens further. Europe, and indeed the world econ-
omy, also experienced a variety of political and economic tremors from the
war, especially in 1971 when Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold
standard, terminating the Bretton Woods financial system. But perhaps the
most notable way in which the Vietnam War was a world event was in terms
of an ever-widening gyre of protest, beginning of course in the USA but
spreading literally worldwide, gathering as it went issues well beyond the war
itself.
The Vietnam War and the Communist World

The Vietnam War affected political thinking worldwide, both at the govern-
mental and the popular level; it concluded with a victory (an immensely
costly one in terms of lives and destruction) for Vietnamese forces and
a defeat for the United States and its allies. But the war also played
a pivotal role in intensifying Soviet–Chinese conflict as a result of the
50
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Australian Catholic University, on 28 Oct 2017 at 14:41:20, subject to the Cambridge
Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316471821.003
solidification of a US–China economic and strategic partnership that became

clear in the years 1970–72. The Vietnam War for independence from France
had been internationalized into an anti-communist crusade in 1950, when the
United States began to shoulder the cost of the French war effort. By the time
the United States was sending its own forces to advise and build up the
southern Vietnamese state created in 1954–55, the Republic of Vietnam, the
conflict was on its way to becoming a long-term feature of the Cold War, part
of the US offensive predicated on the “domino theory,” the purported threat
of expanding communist influence throughout Southeast Asia. US fears of
Soviet and Chinese subversion blinded the administrations of Dwight
Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy to the roots of the war in the Vietnamese
struggle for independence; US actions to a large extent brought about the
Chinese and Soviet involvement that they had ostensibly worked to prevent.
Both the Soviet Union and China had been happy to promote the Geneva
Agreements to end the French–Viet Minh War in 1954. But after the United
States made clear its intent to support an anti-communist southern govern-
ment in breach of the international promise made at Geneva to hold national
elections in 1956, the Chinese began to adjust their thinking. By late 1962,
while the Soviet Union began to focus on promoting détente with the USA,
the Chinese had come to consider the US involvement in southern Vietnam
as a threat to their security. By 1963 they were expanding their supply of
military equipment and discussing their response to possible US aggression
against North Vietnam. In June 1964, Mao Zedong told Van Tien Dung, the
visiting Chief of Staff of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), that “if
the United States risks taking the war to North Vietnam, Chinese troops
should cross the border.” And, “The more you fear the Americans, the more
they will bully you . . . You should not fear, you should fight.”1
Following the overthrow of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, Soviet leaders
continued to view the Vietnam War as an obstacle to détente, even as they
promised military aid to the DRV when the US troop buildup began in 1965.
For the Chinese, however, it presented opportunities. The war for them
became a “litmus test for ‘true communism,’” a way to prove “that the center
of the world revolution had moved from Moscow to Beijing.”2 At the same
time, Mao could use the escalation of the war to promote his domestic
revolution and mass mobilization: The “Resist America and Assist Vietnam
Movement” that began in August 1964 “would penetrate into every part of
1 Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2001), 208–09.
2 Ibid., 212.
51
marilyn b. young and sophie quinn-judge
Chinese society,” making it a “dominant national theme” as the Cultural

Revolution got off the ground.3
Gradually the Soviets came to replace the Chinese as the main suppliers of
military aid to the DRV. And, as the Sino-Soviet rift deepened in 1968, the
Chinese became less focused on Vietnam and more concerned about the
threat from their erstwhile Big Brother. At the same time, the instability and
political overspill from the Cultural Revolution and mounting Sino-Soviet
tensions caused the Vietnamese to become wary of China’s intentions – the
earlier closeness between the neighbors devolved into a relationship of
mutual suspicion. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was less than
enthused to see Vietnam unified so quickly in 1975–76 with the departure of
US forces and with the aid of surface-to-air missiles and other Soviet
weapons.
The United States shared Chinese apprehension of what it now viewed as
a Soviet client state in the heart of Southeast Asia. Thus, by the end of the
Vietnam War the old fears of falling dominoes had been replaced by a more
concrete menace in the minds of US strategists: Now it was the possibility of
Soviet bases in Vietnam, especially Soviet use of the US-built facilities at Cam
Ranh Bay, that concerned the analysts.
On the other hand, the Soviet Politburo gained new confidence in Third
World revolutions from the outcome of the Vietnam War. As Ilya Gaiduk
explains, “Instead of seeing the US defeat in Indochina as a warning against
similar adventures of their own, Soviet leaders, blinded by Marxist-Leninist
philosophy and the conviction that the revolutionary trend of history was on
their side, believed that where imperialism had failed they would certainly
succeed.”4 Under the leadership of the aging Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet
Union began to take a more active role in support of communist-led African
liberation movements, while the Chinese chose to support groups unfriendly
to Moscow. The 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan followed.
The ultimate lesson of the Vietnam War for Moscow, however, would be
quite different. By the late 1980s the Soviets had discovered that a foreign army,
however mighty, cannot impose its system on a client state, especially when
that client regime has only a thin layer of support within its own society.
The military planners in Washington and Moscow tried for a decade to impose
their wills on Vietnam and Afghanistan, but the veterans who fought in these
countries understood the vanity of these campaigns much sooner.
3 Ibid., 214.
4 Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 250.
52
Economic Impact of the Vietnam War

From the economic angle, the Vietnam War could be said to have lifted
many boats, while devastating the mainly rural economies of the Indochinese
countries. It was a bonanza for the economies of East Asia, namely Japan,
Singapore, South Korea and Thailand. Singapore, an island entrepot, shipped
bargeloads of air conditioners to Saigon, along with other items vital to the
survival of US troops in the tropics; the shipyard at Sembawang repaired
US naval ships, even as Singapore claimed to be nonaligned. The US airbases
in Thailand supported whole communities in the country’s impoverished
northeast, while the “rest and recreation (R and R)” industry for US GIs that
flourished in Bangkok and Pattaya created the sex tourism industry. The base
cities of Olongapo and Angeles in the Philippines, and the Okinawan bases
and others in Japan, all experienced the same mix of economic boom and
cultural degradation. (South Vietnam lived through a similar transformation,
but paid the added price of destruction of the countryside and the death and
dislocation of its population.)
The Republic of Korea (ROK) sent more troops than any other ally to
support the South Vietnamese army, the ARVN (Army of the Republic of
Vietnam), driving a hard bargain for this aid. From 1964 until 1973, around
300,000 ROK citizens served in Vietnam, in the parts of central Vietnam
where the National Liberation Front (NLF) resistance was especially fierce.
In exchange the US government agreed to maintain the US Military
Assistance program to the ROK at the 1965 level and to use “offshore
procurement from Korea” for items such as petroleum, oil, lubricants and
construction materials.5 The ROK contingent cost the United States approxi-
mately US$ 2 million annually, after a much larger payout of around US$
43 million in the first year of their deployment.
The short- and long-term effects of the decade of war mobilization on the
US economy will continue to be debated. But there is consensus that the flow
of dollars overseas to pay for the war was a primary cause of the inflation that
became a hallmark of the 1970s. Nixon’s 1971 decision to end the gold standard
helped to ease pressure on the dollar, but interest rates remained high.
The OPEC oil price shock in the last years of the war added to pressure on
the military budget. The inflation and deficits caused by the war exacerbated
the domestic loss of confidence in the US government, which exploded
during and after the Watergate hearings and President Nixon’s resignation.
5 US Army Center of Military History, ch. 6, “The Republic of Korea,” www.history.army

.mil/books/vietnam/allied/ch06.htm, 126.
53
In July 1975 a Lou Harris poll reported that confidence in the military had
dropped from 62 percent to 29 percent during the period from 1966 to 1975;
over the same time span, confidence in business plummeted from 55 percent
to 18 percent and that in both the president and Congress fell from 42 percent
to 13 percent.6
Vietnam and Worldwide Resistance

The protest movement that grew out of the Vietnam War was marked by
extreme disillusionment with governments, but for many it also gave rise to
a shared sense of liberation from repressive social conventions. The US
demonstrations attracted more than 100,000 people by the fall of 1967 and
the March on the Pentagon. And they would continue to grow.
An international gathering in 1968 attracted some 10,000 delegates from
France, Germany, Italy, Greece, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Canada, the
UK and the USA. This was the International Congress on Vietnam at the Free
University in what was then West Berlin. They cheered speeches by Tariq
Ali, Robin Blackburn, Rudi Dutschke, the poet Erich Fried, Bahman
Nirumand, an Iranian revolutionary, and a nephew of Salvatore Allende
among many others; the next day some 20,000 people marched to the
Berlin Opera House chanting revolutionary slogans and carrying placards
with portraits of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Che Guevara and
of course Ho Chi Minh. Protests against the war spanned the globe, from
London and Lisbon to Tokyo, from Mexico to Chile. Che Guevara called for
“two, three, many Vietnams.” In the event there was only one; nevertheless,
the world – or much of it – was present in Vietnam and Vietnam in the world.
Let us focus on Vietnam War protest in the United States first. Mass
protest against the war was not immediate but rather grew with the intensity
of the US military effort in Vietnam and its patent failure to produce
proclaimed results. Nor did it occur outside the larger context of American
political and social movements. The Sixties – to use the general noun
currently in use – were centrally about the recognition, on the part of an ever-
growing number of Americans, that the country in which they thought they
lived – peaceful, generous, honorable, just – did not exist and perhaps never
had. The emergence of a more nuanced history of the United States, as
opposed to the patriotic metanarrative taught in US schools, began not with
6 Cited in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper
Perennial, 2003), 557.
54
the war but with the civil rights movement. Criticism of US policy was
couched initially in the familiar rhetoric of the Cold War, but it quickly
developed in new directions. The new directions in which the civil rights
movement took the country began with a set of tactics, the images that went
with them and a new set of questions: What was the nature of the federal
government’s commitment to universal suffrage? Would it use federal troops
to enforce equal rights for all its citizens? Questions about contemporary
racial arrangements led inevitably to historical ones and an uneasy recogni-
tion of the contradictory nature of the entire national narrative, from
Founding Fathers to contemporary racism to nation-building in Vietnam.
While the press and pundits debated what was to be done in Vietnam,
those Americans who were politically active by and large focused on civil
rights and nuclear disarmament. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom drew 250,000 people to Washington, and no one talked about
Vietnam. But the organizers of rallies for peace and nuclear disarmament
found that the issue of Vietnam increasingly intruded. For one thing, the
tactics the United States was using had begun to receive critical attention.
On 23 March 1963, the New Republic denounced the use of defoliants in an
editorial that began: “The silent war in South Viet-Nam (or should one say
silenced?) has entered a new phase in the wake of Communist charges that the
United States has used ‘poison gas.’” The Pentagon argued that technically
the Geneva Convention on the use of such weapons did not apply, but the
editors dismissed this and instead described, in some detail, the nature of the
chemicals used and the peasants they harmed. “All such considerations may
be just so many sentimentalities to the hard, young realpolitiker and perhaps
they are right that the chemicals being sprayed were not really banned by the
Geneva Convention of 1925.” But the editors doubted that the “dubious
military effectiveness” of the weapon was worth the adverse political
reaction.7 According to David Zierler’s study of scientists’ opposition to the
use of Agent Orange, the editorial “reverberated through the scientific
community,” although it was not until October 1964 that the issue was raised
by the board of the Federation of American Scientists.8 And it would not be
until 1971, after 1.8 million hectares of Vietnamese jungle and farmland had
been poisoned by the dioxin in Agent Orange that the spraying would end.
7 “One Man’s Meat,” New Republic (23 Mar. 1963), 5–6.

8 David Zierler, The Invention of Ecocide: Agent Orange, Vietnam, and the Scientists Who
Changed the Way We Think About the Environment (Athens: University of Georgia Press,
2011), 96.
55
The genetic damage caused by exposure to Agent Orange is still coming to

light in a second generation of victims.
Bertrand Russell’s denunciation of American tactics, published as a letter
to the editor of the New York Times on 8 April 1963, had a different tone.
It began: “The United States Government is conducting a war of annihilation
in Vietnam,” and went on to describe the war as one whose sole purpose was
“the protection of economic interests and the prevention of far-reaching
social reforms in that part of the world.” Moreover, the way the war was
being conducted itself was an “atrocity”: napalm “used against whole villages,
without warning” and chemical warfare “for the purpose of destroying crops
and livestock and to starve the population.” After comparing US tactics to
those of the Germans in Eastern Europe and the Japanese in Southeast Asia
during World War II, Russell concluded: “How long will Americans lend
themselves to this sort of barbarism?” To this, the editors of the newspaper
responded that, despite his eminence as a philosopher, Russell’s letter repre-
sented “something far beyond reasoned criticism. It represents distortions or
half-truths from the first to the last sentences.” The editors did not defend the
government’s ongoing support for the Diem dictatorship or US military
tactics; against Russell’s ethical critique, the New York Times’s editors offered
Realpolitik. Having long urged the implementation of social and economic
reforms as the way to turn the tide, they now warned against “the increasing
military commitment in South Vietnam.” Clearly, the editors did not share
Washington’s excessive optimism about American successes.
Still, the New York Times insisted, American advisors and trainers had done
“a great deal of good.” As for Russell’s specific charges: Napalm, a thickened
oil incendiary agent, may have killed innocents “as other weapons have done
in all wars,” and US advisors opposed its use except against “clearly identified
military targets.” Defoliants (“common weed killers,” as the New York Times
described Agent Orange) were used with limited success to clear the jungle
around enemy base areas. Russell’s failure to acknowledge the “Communist
push for domination against the will of the inhabitants of Vietnam” made
a “mockery of history,” the newspaper declared.9
Russell was present at the first public demonstration against the war in the
form of buttons worn by large numbers of people that read: “I like Bertrand
Russell.” The occasion was the 1963 Easter Peace Walk organized by SANE
9 The full exchange can be read online at War Crimes in Vietnam, part 1, “The Press and
Vietnam: The New York Times, March–July 1963,” www.big-lies.org/vietnam-war-
crimes/russell-67-war-crimes-vietnam-1.html, including the letter the New York Times
published, without Russell’s permission, in a radically edited form.
56
(Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) to coincide with the Aldermaston

march in Britain. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people (the lower figure was
reported by the New York Times, the higher by the organizers; Aldermaston,
it should be noted, drew 70,000 marchers) gathered at UN Plaza in New York
to call for the ratification of a test ban treaty and an end to the arms race.
On the fringe of the crowd several people carried signs calling for a total
US withdrawal from Southeast Asia. Angered at this “confusion” of issues,
SANE officials asked the speakers, Bayard Rustin and Dave Dellinger, to get
rid of them; Rustin tried, but Dellinger refused and at the close of his
prepared speech called on the assembled crowd to “organize against the
threat of US intervention in Vietnam.”10
When the New York Times reported on the event the next day, there was no
mention of the signs. Indeed, there was not much about the rally itself.
On page 63 of the paper, Murray Illson reported that 5,000 pickets, from
church, labor and community groups, had called for a nuclear test ban and
full disarmament. Illson also noted the presence, five blocks away, of twenty-
five members of the US Nationalist Party whose signs read “Bomb the Ban”
and “Ban the Reds, Not Our Bomb.” At about the same distance, eight high
school students carried placards that were somewhat more prolix:
“Commies, Nazis, Black Muslims and Fascists Are One and the Same –
They Must All Go” and “100 Megatons Makes a Hell of a Hole, but Is Life
Under Communism Better?” Toward the end of the story, the reporter
returned to UN Plaza where, he noted, most of the participants in the rally
seemed to be women and children.
But it was the Diem regime’s suppression of Buddhists and, in particular,
the 11 June 1963 self-immolation of Thich Quang Duc that seems to have
focused the attention of activist groups on Vietnam. On 27 June, the New York
Times ran a full-page ad featuring a photograph (on page 21) of the burning
monk and under it, in large black capital letters:
WE, TOO, PROTEST. We, American clergymen of various faiths also
protest. We protest: 1. Our country’s military aid to those who denied him
religious freedom. 2. The immoral spraying of parts of South Vietnam with
crop-destroying chemicals and the herding of many of its people into con-
centration camps called “strategic hamlets.” 3. The loss of American lives and
billions of dollars to bolster a regime universally regarded as unjust, unde-
mocratic, and unstable. 4. The fiction that this is “fighting for freedom.”
10 Andrew Hunt, David Dellinger: Life and Times of a Nonviolent Revolutionary (New York:
New York University Press, 2006), 124.
57
The ad was signed by Harry Emerson Fosdick, James Pike and Reinhold
Niebuhr, among other religious leaders. In smaller print, the ad quoted from
Senator Mike Mansfield’s pessimistic February 1963 report on the prospects
for victory in Vietnam; below that was a quotation from a New York Times
editorial, warning Diem that he could not “discriminate against the majority
of the people of South Vietnam and win his war against the Communists.”
The campaign had been organized by the Rev. Donald Harrington, founder
of the Ministers’ Committee on Vietnam. It included an appeal for funds, and
on 15 September the ad ran again, this time on page 9 with the added words:
“17,358 American clergymen of all faiths have joined this protest. Will you?”11
From this point on, the traditional pacifist groups – the War Resisters
League (WRL), the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
(WILPF), the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the Committee for
Non-Violent Action (CNVA) – all began to organize around the issue of
Vietnam, though, as Tom Cornell pointed out years later, “we never had
a demonstration of more than 250 people until the war got going.”12 WRL
formed special action committees whose task it was to respond to an
immediate crisis with instantaneous pamphlets and demonstrations. It was
not always easy. Women Strike for Peace (WSP), organized in 1961, for
example, struggled with whether to include Vietnam in their protest agenda.
“A standing joke in Washington headquarters,” WSP’s historian recalled,
“was ‘a not-so-funny thing happened to us on the way to disarmament – the
Vietnam war.’”13 At the second national conference in 1963, a motion from
the floor to condemn US intervention led to a lengthy debate that ended
finally in a decision to pay attention to Vietnam in the coming year and “alert
the public to the dangers and horrors of the war in Vietnam and to the
specific ways in which human morality is being violated by the US attack
on . . . women and children.”14
The US visit of Madame Nhu, the de facto first lady as sister-in-law of
South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, inspired demonstrations by
peace groups on and off campuses (300 people at Columbia University, for
11 New York Times (27 Jun. 1963), 21. A two-paragraph story about the ad appeared on p. 8
of that day’s paper. On 15 August 1963, p. 3, the newspaper carried a brief story with the
headline “US Clergymen Score US Aid to Diem.” Again, there was no byline, and the
story simply stated that Harrington, as head of the Ministers’ Committee on Vietnam,
had sent a letter to Kennedy protesting ongoing support for Diem.
12 Hunt, Dellinger, 134.
13 Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace: Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the
1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 129.
14 Ibid.
58
example), and the hotels where she stayed were noisily picketed: “No Nhus
Is Good Nhus.” It should be noted that LIFE magazine easily rivaled the
pickets in the misogynistic relish with which they reported the tour.
The same issue carried the cover story, “Mac Finds Out What’s Gone
Wrong,” referring to the latest troubleshooting mission by Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara. Inside, huge black letters announced: “Now
We Talk Tough: Shape Up or We’ll Cut Our Aid.” Nevertheless, LIFE
remained committed to the general enterprise. In the words of its
Southeast Asia correspondent: “Vietnam must be held – a primitive, complex
mixture of East and West and a bastion against the Chinese from the north.”15
At this point, in spite of the severe political crisis in Saigon, no major media
outlet would depart from its overall support of US goals in Vietnam.
At the same time, a call for a new kind of radical politics, more a mood
than a movement, had begun to coalesce into the New Left, and there were
nascent protests against the draft. In retrospect, 1963 was the antechamber to
the anti-war movement. Some of the divisions that would mark its progress
were already visible, such as the reluctance of groups that had focused on
broader issues of peace and disarmament or civil rights to shift gears to full-
time anti-war work. The repertoire of protest actions developed in the civil
rights movement, from sit-ins to educational projects (Freedom Schools/
teach-ins) did not appear all at once but rather expanded in pace with the war
itself. The first teach-in against the war was organized at the University of
Michigan in 1965, to be followed by countless others around the country.
By then it was abundantly clear that the sullen acceptance with which the
Korean War had been tolerated would not prevail this time.
On a note both lighter and darker, Russell Baker summarized the state of
the union on Christmas Day, 1963. His column that day reviewed American
policy in general and Vietnam policy in particular. It concluded: “[N]obody in
authority considers [Vietnam] a war, and your Government urges you not to
think of it as a war. In fact, your Government urges you not to think of it at
all.”16 By 1965 it was impossible for anyone not to think about Vietnam.17
Early on in the war, some leaders of the civil rights movement began to
connect racial justice at home and the war abroad. Malcolm X, for example,
denounced the war in December 1964 and, before the year was out, he was
15 LIFE (11 Oct. 1963), 25. 16 Russell Baker, “Observer,” New York Times (25 Dec. 1963), 36.
17 See Douglas Robinson, “Policy in Vietnam Scored in Rallies Throughout the US,”
New York Times (16 Oct. 1965). Some 10,000 marchers tried to reach the Oakland army
base but were blocked by 300 Oakland policemen.
59
joined by James Forman, executive secretary of the Student Non-Violent

Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1965, the McComb, Mississippi, branch
of the Freedom Democratic Party explicitly called for draft resistance: “No one
has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in . . .
Vietnam so that the White American can get richer. We will be looked upon as
traitors to the Colored People of the world if Negro people continue to fight
and die without a cause . . .. We can write our sons and ask if they know what
they are fighting for. If he answers Freedom, tell him that’s what we are
fighting for here in Mississippi. And if he says Democracy tell him the truth –
we don’t know anything about Communism, socialism, and all that, but we do
know that Negroes have caught hell under this American democracy.”18 World
heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali brought the issue of black
resistance to the war to a far larger audience, when he refused to be drafted
in 1967, saying “I ain’t got no quarrel with those Vietcong.” For this, Ali was
stripped of his title, sentenced to jail (the Supreme Court eventually threw the
conviction out) and barred from the ring for three years.
By 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr., had not only endorsed draft resistance, but
had also expressed unexpected empathy for the “desperate, rejected and angry
young men” who had set ghettoes from Watts to Washington, DC, on fire:
“As I have walked among [them] I have told them that Molotov cocktails and
rifles would not solve their problems . . . But they asked – and rightly so – what
about Vietnam? . . . Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never
again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos
without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today – my own government.”19 A May 1967 FBI report on the
potential for racial violence in the summer of that year noted the link between
the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War movement with considerable
alarm: “King has now joined [Stokely] Carmichael [of the SNCC], [Floyd]
McKissick [of the Congress of Racial Equality], and other civil rights extremists
in embracing the communist tactic of linking the civil rights movement with
the anti-Vietnam-war protest movement . . . King’s exhortation to boycott the
draft and refuse to fight could lead eventually to dangerous displays of civil
disobedience and near-seditious activities by Negroes and whites alike.”20
18 Quoted in Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), 198.
19 Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World,
ed. James Melvin (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 135–52.
20 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Racial Violence Potential in the US This Summer,”
23 May 1967, www.ddrs.psmedia.com.
60
The assassinations of King and Malcolm X short-circuited what might have

been a powerful, united movement against the war and for fundamental
social justice. In the event the mainstream of the anti-war movement nar-
rowed its focus to a single goal: to end the war in Vietnam.21 This focus was
adopted by a wide range of groups, from Students for a Democratic Society
to traditional peace churches and more mainstream denominations, repre-
sented by the National Council of Churches, and GI anti-war groups such as
Veterans for Peace. The destruction of a small Southeast Asian country by
the most powerful military machine in the world, which unfolded daily in the
press and on TV screens, never felt ordinary. Rather, for many Americans, it
assumed nightmare proportions, requiring an ever-greater need to protest
and somehow bring it to an end.
Richard Nixon, like Lyndon Johnson before him, was extremely sensitive
to the anti-war movement and monitored it closely. “Realizes,” his aide Bob
Haldeman noted in his diary for 29 September 1969, referring to the president,
that “war support is more tenuous every day and knows we have to maintain
it somehow.” Fearful of the coming October moratorium, Nixon considered
scheduling a press conference that would “preempt coverage of the day’s
activities.” The point, Haldeman told his diary, was to “try to make the
innocents see they are being used . . . Hard to do much because momentum
is tremendous and broad based.” The November moratorium – a nationwide
call to suspend “business as usual” in order to protest the war – disturbed
Nixon even more. He thought hard about it and had “helpful ideas like using
helicopters to blow their candles out.” Much in the style of his superior’s later
observation of the Great Wall of China, that it was a great wall, Haldeman
noted that “the big march turned out to be huge.” Even, “really huge.”22
In fact, as many as 500,000 people turned out for the demonstration
in November, making it the largest of the war.
At the same time, many Americans were as upset by the demonstrators as
by the war. Indeed, their opposition to Washington’s war frequently took the
form of urging that the government go “in” or get “out” – where going in
meant unleashing the yet more total destruction of Vietnam as a means of
getting out victorious. As George Packer described it, the Sixties, “which
21 Factions of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground

embraced a more militant agenda, convinced that an armed uprising in the United
States was not only necessary but possible. For them, the war in Vietnam was no more
than another instance of American imperialism which would end only when capitalism
itself was overthrown.
22 H. R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House (New York:
Berkley, 1995), 110, 129.
61
began in liberal consensus over the Cold War and civil rights, became
a struggle between two apocalyptic politics that each saw the other as hell-
bent on the country’s annihilation. The result was violence like nothing the
country had seen since the civil war.”23 Republican politicians skillfully
manipulated these enmities (and still do).
Finally, Ho Chi Minh did win. His colleagues and heirs had defeated the
world’s preeminent military power. And the anti-war movement had
succeeded as well, if not in ending the war then at least in contributing to
its end. It took more than a decade to achieve this, but the legacies of the anti-
war movement, like the legacies of the war itself, lingered and for a time
seemed to have an effect, albeit limited. The resistance to the war within the
military was the exception – this was a phenomenon that changed American
war-making over the long term. The GI anti-war movement brought about
the end of the draft and the switch to an all-volunteer military force. Not just
the future senator and secretary of state John Kerry, but eventually 25 percent
of enlisted men engaged in some form of anti-war action. David Cortright
writes that, “In virtually every corner of the military, the burden of fighting
an unpopular and unwinnable war caused social disruption and institutional
decay. It is probably safe to say that no institution in American society
suffered more from the Vietnam War than the military itself. This was due
not only to the horrific human cost of the war – more than 59,000 fatalities
and hundreds of thousands of severe injuries – but also its profound social and
political impact in generating widespread internal opposition and
disaffection.”24
International opposition to the crusade in Vietnam began even before the

United States officially committed its troops to the battle in 1965. And
President Johnson met a cool response when he tried to persuade
European leaders to contribute troops, as the British, Belgians, French and
Dutch had done under UN auspices for the Korean War.
Bertrand Russell wrote his letter of denunciation to the New York Times in
1963, and in 1966 he founded the International War Crimes Tribunal in which
representatives of some eighteen countries participated in hearings on the
war held in Sweden and Denmark. They concluded, unanimously, that the
United States had been guilty of committing war crimes in Vietnam.
23 George Packer, “The Fall of Conservatism,” New Yorker (26 May 2008).
24 David Cortright, “Resistance in the Military: How Dissent and Defiance in the Ranks
Helped to End the Vietnam War,” paper delivered at conference “The Vietnam War,
Then and Now: Assessing the Critical Lessons” (Washington, DC, 29–30 Apr. 2015), 3.
62
The force of the international movement around Vietnam was only in part
about Vietnamese victimization. Rather it took its force and substance from
the multiple connections made by anti-war activists across all borders –
including those of North Vietnam and the NLF. And, as in the United
States, the power of the movement was linked to domestic issues in each
country so that, by 1968, while Vietnam was never absent it had also, to some
degree, become connected, in each country, to a wider set of issues.
The movement against the war in Vietnam was, at the same time,
a movement for fundamental change of the society itself. In the United
States, the anti-war movement led to a new consciousness and the rewriting
of national history, with a broader focus on women, Native Americans,
slavery and social movements. It pried open the selection of political candi-
dates, giving a larger voice to ordinary citizens in the primary process. It is
possible the iconic events in France in May 1968 would have taken place
anyway – but the mobilization against the war made it easier, even more
likely. This was the start of a challenge to the right of patriarchs to control
world affairs, which continues today.
In varying degree, anti-war activists across the globe embraced Vietnam as
a revolutionary exemplar, as the embodiment of all Third World hopes, as
contributing to the end of imperialism everywhere. The International
Congress on Vietnam held at the Free University in West Berlin is a case in
point. The flag of the National Liberation Front was raised alongside a banner
quoting Che: “The duty of a revolutionary is to make a revolution.” There
were speakers from West Germany, Chile, France, the UK, the USA, Iran and
Italy. Rudi Dutschke, mixing Maoist metaphors with New Left rhetoric,
called for a “long march through institutions,” the building of counterinstitu-
tions and, in defiance of the vast historical difference between China in the
1930s and Europe in the 1960s, the construction of liberated zones. The West
German government had originally banned a public demonstration but the
injunction was overturned in court, and a crowd of some 20,000 marched
along Kurfürstendamm. There was a sense, one observer said, of “breaking
the ice that has frozen over Europe’s history.”25
In Japan, in that same winter of discontent, demonstrators gathered to
protest the docking of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise – which was on its
way to Vietnam – at the Sasebo naval base. Some 47,000 protesters gathered
at the harbor to protest while small boats carrying demonstrators who
25 Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets (London: Bloomsbury/
New York: Free Press, 1998), 48.
63
appealed to the crew to desert circled the ship. Direct challenges to the
ability of the United States to fight the war characterized the peace move-
ment in Japan, from welcoming and aiding soldiers and sailors who opposed
the war and deserted, to efforts to block the transport of arms and
ammunition.
With the 1968 Tet or New Year’s Offensive, the international expres-
sions of solidarity became even more fervent. The offensive, which had
been organized too fast for the southerners to prepare adequately, did
not succeed in triggering a mass uprising in South Vietnam, as Lien-hang
Nguyen has pointed out, but it did serve “as a catalyst in other social
protest movements in Europe, Asia and Latin America.”26 And, she might
have added, Africa. “We stand with them,” Frelimo (Frente de Libertação
de Moçambique, Mozambican Liberation Front) guerrillas fighting
against the Portuguese were said to have cheered as they listened to an
account of Tet over the radio. The Pakistani poet Habib Jalib openly
warned the government: “The cloud of dynamite that covers Vietnam is
moving your way.”27 In El Salvador the growing guerrilla movement saw
armed struggle as the only way forward, and Cuba and Vietnam their
models.
In Paris a section of the Left Bank was renamed “The Heroic Vietnam
Quarter,” and the NLF flag flew over the Sorbonne. Meanwhile in London,
the numbers of demonstrators grew from 25,000 people who gathered in
Trafalgar Square in March to the 100,000 who came out to protest
in October 1968. It would perhaps be easier to name the countries in which
demonstrations did not take place, thanks to authoritarian right-wing gov-
ernments (Argentina, Greece), than those in which they did.
Among the most significant ways in which Vietnam was in the world and
the world in Vietnam was its assiduous pursuit of what its chronicler Robert
Brigham has called “people’s diplomacy.” The support of communist govern-
ments – even when they were most at odds, as was the case with China and
the Soviet Union in this period – was assured. But both Hanoi and the NLF
sought the support of peace groups everywhere and, for obvious reasons,
most particularly in the United States. The more pressure that could be
brought on the US government to negotiate on acceptable terms, the closer
Vietnam could come to an end to the killing. As Lien-hang Nguyen puts it,
the Vietnamese “utilized . . . transnational revolutionary circuits in the 1960s
26 Lien-hang Nguyen, “Revolutionary Circuits: Toward Internationalizing America in

the World,” Diplomatic History 39, 3 (2015), 413.
27 Ali and Watkins, 1968, 36.
64
and 1970s.”28 These circuits included distinctly nonrevolutionary individuals –

pacifists and a variety of political activists from the novelist Grace Paley to the
historian Staughton Lynd. In many ways the most fruitful connections came
through the efforts of Vietnamese women organized in the north as the
Vietnam Women’s Union and in the south as the Women’s Union of
Liberation.
The notion of a global sisterhood, attractive to newly energized feminist
groups in the United States, was put to good use by the Vietnamese in
numerous international meetings, including one held in Paris in 1968, shortly
before the inauguration of formal peace talks. The Conference of Concerned
Women to End the War included representatives from Japan, the UK,
Australia, New Zealand, West Germany, Canada and the United States.
The impact on the Americans who attended was particularly strong.
At the same time, veterans and young volunteers from the International
Voluntary Service, American Friends Service Committee and other peace
churches returned home from serving in South Vietnam and brought back
tales of the senseless violence being perpetrated by the United States. From
the Indochina Mobile Education Project to the Winter Soldier hearings in
1971, the American people were receiving first-hand reports of the war that
were far more troubling than the scenes on their brief evening newscasts.
These projects brought the voices of the Vietnamese people, unfiltered by
politics, directly into American communities. The US press, as well, increas-
ingly played this role.
Vietnamese efforts were not limited to Europe or North America but were
also directed toward Third World struggles elsewhere. Vietnamese met with
and apparently inspired members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine, Vietnamese texts were translated and circulated to activists
throughout the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America. Particularly
effective were the travels of Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, a member of the
Paris peace delegation, who “toured the world in 1970, meeting with antiwar
activists, heads of state, and revolutionary leaders.” With the aid of not one
but two African heads of state (Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote), Binh
arrived in Lusaka to participate in the Non-Aligned Conference despite the
fact that Zambia did not recognize the NLF’s Provisional Revolutionary
Government (PRG). When some delegates protested that the NLF was
hardly nonaligned, a representative from Algeria questioned the nonalign-
ment credentials of those in attendance whose countries served as bases for
28 Nguyen, “Revolutionary Circuits,” 412.
65
the US war against Vietnam; Fidel Castro himself insisted that Vietnam “was
the most excellent example of the soul and spirit of the non-alignment
movement,” and Binh’s subsequent speech was held up by the African
press as “the rallying cry of the entire summit.”29
It was the combination of the war as a revolution to be admired or even
emulated and the war as an example of the victimization of a Third World
country by the most powerful military in the world that made the movement
against the war so nearly universal. The Vietnamese struggle was seen as
a struggle to defend “all of humanity.”30
Not until February 2003 would the world again witness such widespread
protest against the war-making of a major power. But US war-making in the
twenty-first century, with a volunteer army, is different from war-making in
the twentieth, and Iraq was not, after all, Vietnam. The end of conscription in
the United States, a direct result of Vietnam anti-war activism, meant that
most American men of college age were not touched by the war. The US
armed forces had learned other lessons from their failure in Vietnam:
Journalists were no longer so free to helicopter in and out of battle zones,
but mostly covered the war as “embedded” correspondents with US units.
TV coverage of the coffins of dead soldiers arriving on US soil was also placed
off-limits. If Vietnam became a television war, the war in Iraq was almost
invisible to the general public, a war spun and managed by press
spokespeople.
Conclusion
The Vietnam War’s impact on the United States and the world would be hard
to overestimate. The United States, the major military, economic and tech-
nological power of the post-World War II era, was defeated by a poor,
underdeveloped country. The country went through a tremendous loss of
faith in war-making as a viable solution to imagined or real threats – this self-
doubt and disillusionment are still referred to as “the Vietnam syndrome.”
But the new Socialist Republic of Vietnam, formally unified in 1976, did not
win much more than national glory. The geopolitical advantage that
Vietnam, along with their Soviet patrons, expected to gain quickly dissolved,
as a new conflict, this time with the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, came
29 Nguyen, “Revolutionary Circuits,” 421.

30 Marc Lazar, “Le Parti Communiste Français et l’action de solidarité avec le Vietnam,”
in Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaisse (eds.), La Guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe
(1963–1973) (Brussels and Paris: Bruylant/LGDJ, 2003), 250.
66
to absorb Vietnam’s resources. As Vietnam was drawn into a decade-long

occupation of Cambodia and economic stagnation, their new rivals to the
north, the Chinese, embraced economic reform and stoked a border con-
frontation with Vietnam that lasted until 1990. This shift from a monolithic
communist bloc in Asia to a fragmented state of hostility was one of the
outcomes of the Vietnam War, for China’s ties with the United States came
about as a result of the diplomacy to end the war.
The war was a major turning point in the Cold War, coming to life at
a moment when there was a strong impetus for détente in the world, at the
end of the Korean War and the first Indochina War. The US decision not to
implement the peace process delineated at Geneva in 1954 kept the Cold War
alive and led gradually to the transformation of a colonial war for indepen-
dence into a vastly destructive proxy war among the superpowers.
For the communist world, the Vietnam War became a test of alliances and
long-term ideological goals. In the end, the war both changed and was
changed by these alliances. The People’s Republic of China at first viewed
the war as a means of mobilizing its population and keeping the US military
tied down in Southeast Asia. Chinese military and material aid to Vietnam
also helped Mao Zedong to increase his prestige in the Third World as a true
supporter of world revolution, at the expense of the USSR. But as the Sino-
Soviet split grew more bitter in the mid 1960s and, after ideological debate
gave way to warfare on their northern border in 1969, the Chinese leadership
became more concerned with the threat to their nation from the Soviet
Union. With the United States admitting after 1968 that the war was
a stalemate, the Chinese found themselves being courted by the Nixon
administration. Henry Kissinger, the key architect of US foreign policy
under Nixon, saw that the best escape from the Vietnam quagmire would
be to normalize relations with China, thus ending the threat of monolithic
communism in Asia and depriving Vietnam of its once-trusted ally. Nixon’s
visit to China in the spring of 1972 was the start of an economic relationship
that has grown today into perhaps the most influential factor in the health of
the world economy. The strategic partnership to counter Soviet hegemony
that began in that year has, on the other hand, lost its force with the end of
the Soviet Union.
The international impact of the Vietnam War at the popular level has been
longlasting. The power of leftist theory regarding economic justice may have
ebbed with the death of European communism in 1989–91. But the passions
stirred by the war in the 1960s and 1970s have not disappeared, and in fact
international civil society seems better prepared than ever to track the true
67
facts on the ground when war breaks out. The Iraq War was remarkable for
the attention paid to civilian casualties and international efforts to record
these deaths by groups such as Iraq Body Count. We retain the revulsion
against the high-tech cruelty of modern warfare, especially indiscriminate
bombing, that we once felt at the sight of children flaming with napalm,
running down a country road. The fact that the US administration is reluctant
to hold a congressional vote to sanction the continuing wars in the Middle
East, in the face of popular opposition to the ongoing “war against terror,”
says much about popular feelings about war.
Bibliographical Essay
New political histories of the Vietnam War now appear with regularity, as
scholars gain access to more archives of the US State Department, some from
the Pentagon and written by official Armed Forces historians, as well as
collections of presidential papers and tapes in the libraries of Presidents
Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. A few examples:
books by Fredrik Logevall, The Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the
Making of America’s Vietnam (New York: Random House, 2012), and Choosing
War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), Mark A. Lawrence, Assuming the Burden:
Europe and the American Commitment to the War in Vietnam (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), Mark Philip Bradley, Imagining
Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam, 1919–1950 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), and William J. Rust,
Eisenhower and Cambodia: Diplomacy, Covert Action, and the Origins of
the Second Indochina War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016),
all provide valuable context and multiarchival scholarship on the origins of
the US war. David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest (New York:
Random House, 1972) is one of several excellent books by journalists about
the failures of US policymaking for Vietnam. Several scholars have utilized
Nixon’s White House papers and tapes to write on the final years of the war,
including Jeffrey Kimball in Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 1998).
For general US histories of the war, from its origins up to 1975 and beyond,
one can single out George Herring’s America’s Longest War: The United States
and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1979) as a concise and
objective study; Marilyn B. Young’s The Vietnam Wars: 1945–1990 (New York:
HarperCollins, 1991) covers all three Indochina Wars with great
68
thoroughness and a strong critique of US policy. Essential eyewitness

accounts of the way the war was fought include the two books by
Jonathan Schell, The Village of Ben Suc and The Military Half, now combined
in one paperback volume entitled The Real War: The Classic Reporting on the
Vietnam War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). For in-depth scholarly
research, David Elliott provides a two-volume work on the communists
(known as the Viet Cong by the US military) in the Mekong delta:
The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta,
1930–1975 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2003). Mai Elliott, who worked with
David for the Rand Corporation, has contributed a study of Rand in Southeast
Asia: A History of Vietnam War Era (Santa Monica, CA: Rand, 2010). Rand,
a contractor to the US military, was responsible for much of US government
analysis, and as Mai Elliott shows, in the early days it was strongly influenced
by one analyst who saw the bombing of the DRV as the key to winning the
war. His ideas later lost favor.
“International history” of the Vietnam War, covering all the state actors
with a major influence on the war, is a genre pioneered by British scholar
Ralph B. Smith. His three-volume An International History of the Vietnam War
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984, 1986, 1991) is still the most in-depth work
of this type, using the BBC Monitoring service and the CIA’s Foreign
Broadcast Information Service as basic sources for the communist bloc. His
inclusion of economic analysis keeps his study relevant, even though he
wrote without the archival information on Soviet and Chinese policies that
would become available in the 1990s. His successors include Singaporean
scholar Ang Cheng Guan, who completed the Smith opus with a final volume
entitled International History of the Vietnam War: The Denouement, 1967–1975
(London: Routledge, 2011).
More recent international histories using Hanoi archives by Pierre Asselin,
Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954–1965 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013), and Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History
of the War for Peace in Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2012), purport to be the final word on Hanoi’s role and thinking
regarding the war. However, both authors take a revisionist view that puts
strong emphasis on Hanoi’s actions without providing a balanced view of
US war planning. The old issue of whether the Vietnamese had the right to
fight to unify their country after the failure of the Geneva Agreements goes
unaddressed.
Studies based on communist archives: The partial opening of archives in
China, Eastern Europe and Russia during the 1990s has provided a deeper
69
understanding of attitudes within the socialist bloc to the Vietnam War. For
China, Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001), and Qiang Zhai, China and the Vietnam Wars,
1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), have set the
pace with their overviews. Ilya Gaiduk, a Russian historian, has written two
books using the Soviet archives: The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996) and Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward
the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963 (Washington, DC, and Stanford: Woodrow
Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2003). Norwegian
scholar Mari Olsen has also contributed a study based on the Soviet
Foreign Ministry archive: Soviet–Vietnam Relations and the Role of China,
1949–1964: Changing Alliances (London: Routledge, 2006). All of these studies
confirm the reluctance of the USSR to become involved in the second
Vietnam War, until 1965.
The anti-war movement, in the United States and worldwide:
We recommend the exhaustive bibliography established by Ed Moise on
this topic (edmoise.sites.clemson.edu/antiwar.html), but will select a few
examples, specifically on the world movement: Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins,
1968: Marching in the Streets (London: Bloomsbury/New York: Free Press,
1998), is heavily illustrated and covers protest demonstrations in many
countries. Christoper Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse (eds.), La guerre du
Vietnam et l’Europe (1963–1973) (Brussels and Paris: Bruylant/LGDJ, 2003), is
a collection of papers, some in French and some in English. Among the ones
dealing with the anti-war movement are: Jost Dülffer, “The Anti-Vietnam
War Movement in West Germany,” 287–305; Nadine Lubelski-Bernard,
“L’opposition à la guerre du Vietnam en Belgique (1963–1973),” 307–26; and
Kim Saloman, “The Anti-Vietnam War Movement in Sweden,” 327–37.
Reports from the sessions of the International War Crimes Tribunal
(founded by Bertrand Russell) are online at raetowest.org/Vietnam-war-
crimes/russell-vietnam-war-crimes-tribunal-1967.html. The complete tran-
scripts of the Winter Soldier Investigation are available at www.wintersoldier
.com/index.php?topic=CompletWSI. This includes the introduction by
Senator Mark Hatfield, when he presented the testimonies to the Senate on
5 April 1971. The three-day event was organized by Vietnam Veterans Against
the War, on 31 January, 1 February and 2 February 1971.
Two other sources on US war crimes are books by German writer
Bernd Greiner, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009 [2007]); and Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves:
The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).
70
Both use the Pentagon’s own investigations into reported war crimes, after
the My Lai massacre came to light.
On the anti-war movement within the US armed forces, David Cortright’s
Soldiers in Revolt, 1975 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2005) is an excellent source by
a participant-observer.
71

3 - Young2017

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

3 - Young2017

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

2

The Vietnam War as a World Event

The Vietnam War and the Communist World

solidiﬁcation of a US–China economic and strategic partnership that became

Chinese society,” making it a “dominant national theme” as the Cultural

Economic Impact of the Vietnam War

5 US Army Center of Military History, ch. 6, “The Republic of Korea,” www.history.army

Vietnam and Worldwide Resistance

7 “One Man’s Meat,” New Republic (23 Mar. 1963), 5–6.

The genetic damage caused by exposure to Agent Orange is still coming to

(Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) to coincide with the Aldermaston

joined by James Forman, executive secretary of the Student Non-Violent

The assassinations of King and Malcolm X short-circuited what might have

21 Factions of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground

International opposition to the crusade in Vietnam began even before the

26 Lien-hang Nguyen, “Revolutionary Circuits: Toward Internationalizing America in

and 1970s.”28 These circuits included distinctly nonrevolutionary individuals –

28 Nguyen, “Revolutionary Circuits,” 412.

29 Nguyen, “Revolutionary Circuits,” 421.

to absorb Vietnam’s resources. As Vietnam was drawn into a decade-long

thoroughness and a strong critique of US policy. Essential eyewitness

You might also like