The Anti-War Movement in the United States (Vietnam)

[chlamor]

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html

Though the first American protests against U.S. intervention in Vietnam took place in 1963, the antiwar movement did not begin in earnest until nearly two years later, when President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered massive U.S. military intervention and the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. In the spring of 1965, "teach-ins" against the war were held on many college campuses. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized the first national antiwar demonstration in Washington; 20,000 people, mainly students, attended.

As the war expanded—over 400,000 U.S. troops would be in Vietnam by 1967—so did the antiwar movement, attracting growing support off the campuses. The movement was less a unified army than a rich mix of political notions and visions. The tactics used were diverse: legal demonstrations, grassroots organizing, congressional lobbying, electoral challenges, civil disobedience, draft resistance, self-immolations, political violence. Some peace activists traveled to North Vietnam. Quakers and others provided medical aid to Vietnamese civilian victims of the war. Some G.I.s protested the war.

In March 1967, a national organization of draft resisters was formed; the Resistance would subsequently hold several national draft card turn-ins. In April 1967, more than 300,000 people demonstrated against the war in New York. Six months later, 50,000 surrounded the Pentagon, sparking nearly 700 arrests. By now, senior Johnson administration officials typically encountered demonstrators when speaking in public, forcing them to restrict their outside appearances. Many also had sons, daughters, or wives who opposed the war, fueling the sense of besiegement. Prominent participants in the antiwar movement included Dr. Benjamin Spock, Robert Lowell, Harry Belafonte, and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Encouraged by the movement, Senator Eugene McCarthy announced in late 1967 that he was challenging Johnson in the 1968 Democratic primaries; his later strong showing in New Hampshire was seen as a major defeat for Johnson and a repudiation of his war policies.

Many labor leaders spoke out for the first time, and blue-collar workers joined antiwar activities in unprecedented numbers.

The Johnson administration took numerous measures to the antiwar movement, most notably undertaking close surveillance and tarnishing its public image, sending speakers to campuses, and fostering pro-war activity. Many administration officials felt foreign Communists were aiding and abetting the movement, despite the failure of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI to uncover such support.

In 1965, a majority of Americans supported U.S. policies in Vietnam; by the fall of 1967, only 35 percent did so. For the first time, more people thought U.S. intervention in Vietnam had been a mistake than did not. Blacks and women were the most dovish social groups. Later research found that antiwar sentiment was inversely correlated with people's socioeconomic level. Many Americans also disliked antiwar protesters, and the movement was frequently denounced by media commentators, legislators, and other public figures.

By 1968, faced with widespread public opposition to the war and troubling prospects in Vietnam, the Johnson administration halted the bombing of North Vietnam and stabilized the ground war. This policy reversal was the major turning point. U.S. troop strength in Vietnam would crest at 543,000.

The antiwar movement reached its zenith under President Richard M. .Nixon. In October 1969, more than 2 million people participated in Vietnam Moratorium protests across the country. The following month, over 500,000 demonstrated in Washington and 150,000 in San Francisco. Militant protest, mainly youthful, continued to spread, leading many Americans to wonder whether the war was worth a split society. And other forms of antiwar activity persisted. The Nixon administration took a host of measures to blunt the movement, mainly mobilizing supporters, smearing the movement, tracking it, withdrawing U.S. troops from Vietnam, instituting a draft lottery, and eventually ending draft calls.

Two long-standing problems continued to plague the antiwar movement. Many participants questioned its effectiveness, spawning dropouts, hindering the organization of protests and the maintenance of antiwar groups, and aggravating dissension over strategies and tactics. And infighting continued to sap energy, alienate activists, and hamper antiwar planning. The strife was fanned by the U.S. government, but it was largely internally generated.

Over 100,000 demonstrated in Washington, despite only a week's prior notice.

In the spring of 1970, President Nixon's invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings (followed by those at Jackson State) sparked the greatest display of campus protest in U.S. history. A national student strike completely shut down over 500 colleges and universities. Other Americans protested in cities across the country; many lobbied White House officials and members of Congress. Over 100,000 demonstrated in Washington, despite only a week's prior notice. Senators John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church sponsored legislation (later passed) prohibiting funding of U.S. ground forces and advisers in Cambodia. Many labor leaders spoke out for the first time, and blue-collar workers joined antiwar activities in unprecedented numbers. However, construction workers in New York assaulted a group of peaceful student demonstrators, and (with White House assistance) some union leaders organized pro-administration rallies.

Despite worsening internal divisions and a flagging movement, 500,000 people demonstrated against the war in Washington in April 1971. Vietnam Veterans Against the War also staged protests, and other demonstrators engaged in mass civil disobedience, prompting 12,000 arrests. The former Pentagon aide Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Meanwhile, the morale and discipline of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam was deteriorating seriously: drug abuse was rampant, combat refusals and racial strife were mounting, and some soldiers were even murdering their own officers.

With U.S. troops coming home, the antiwar movement gradually declined between 1971 and 1975. The many remaining activists protested continued U.S. bombing, the plight of South Vietnamese political prisoners, and U.S. funding of the war.

The American movement against the Vietnam War was the most successful antiwar movement in U.S. history. During the Johnson administration, it played a significant role in constraining the war and was a major factor in the administration's policy reversal in 1968. During the Nixon years, it hastened U.S. troop withdrawals, continued to restrain the war, fed the deterioration in U.S. troop morale and discipline (which provided additional impetus to U.S. troop withdrawals), and promoted congressional legislation that severed U.S. funds for the war. The movement also fostered aspects of the Watergate scandal, which ultimately played a significant role in ending the war by undermining Nixon's authority in Congress and thus his ability to continue the war. It gave rise to the infamous "Huston Plan"; inspired Daniel Ellsberg, whose release of the Pentagon Papers led to the formation of the Plumbers; and fed the Nixon administration's paranoia about its political enemies, which played a major part in concocting the Watergate break-in itself.

[JackRiddler]

.

Documentary I would most require to be viewed in US high schools:

Sir, No Sir!

One of the great documentaries of our time - focusing on how the genocidal war in Vietnam came to a standstill thanks to the resistance of the American soldiers themselves. A remedy for the Rambo myth. Order it today!

These are the veterans we should honor, above all others: The ones who risked themselves for the right reason.

Interview with director:

http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2005 ... eiger.html

MotherJones.com / News / QA

Sir, No Sir! An Interview with David Zeiger
The director's Vietnam documentary Sir! No Sir! chronicles a forgotten movement and presents a history lesson for the present." />

Jonathan Stein" />
September 01" /> , 2005" />

The Oleo Strut was a coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, from 1968 to 1972. Like its namesake, a shock absorber in helicopter landing gear, the Oleo Strut’s purpose was to help GIs land softly. Upon returning from Vietnam to Fort Hood, shell-shocked soldiers found solace amongst the Strut’s regulars, mostly fellow soldiers and a few civilian sympathizers. But it didn’t take long before shell shock turned into anger, and that anger into action. The GIs turned the Oleo Strut into one of Texas’s anti-war headquarters, publishing an underground anti-war newspaper, organizing boycotts, setting up a legal office, and leading peace marches.

David Zeiger was one of the civilians who helped run the Oleo Strut. He went on to a career in political activism and today, at 55, he is a filmmaker and the director of Sir! No Sir!, a new documentary on the all-but-forgotten antiwar activities of GIs from Fort Hood to Saigon. The GI Movement, as it was then known, was composed of both vets recently returned from Vietnam and active-duty soldiers. They fought for peace in ways big and small, from organizing leading anti-war organizations to wearing peace signs instead of dog tags. By the early ‘70s, opposition to the Vietnam War within the military and amongst veterans had grown so widespread that no one could credibly claim that opposing the war meant opposing the troops. Veterans wanted an end to the war; their brothers in Vietnam agreed.

Zeiger put off making this movie for years, convinced the public didn’t want to hear another story about the ‘60s. What finally spurred the project was the Iraq War and the role some Vietnam vets are playing in keeping America’s young men and women from seeing the same horrors they saw. When GIs from the current war started coming home and wondering what they’d been fighting for, Zeiger’s days at the Oleo Strut took on a new relevance. His film is a remarkable interweaving of vets’ stories about their intensifying resistance to the war, starting with the lone objectors of the late ‘60s and culminating with open disobedience throughout the ranks in the ‘70s. One vet even recalls an episode from 1972 in which Military Police joined enlisted men in burning an effigy of their commanding officer. The images that accompany such stories are just as powerful. As a young doctor is escorted into a military court for refusing to train GIs, hundreds of enlisted men lean out of nearby windows extending peace signs in support. It’s an image that the Army didn’t want the American people to see then, and probably wouldn’t want the American people to see today.

Sir! No Sir! won the Documentary Audience Award at the L.A. Film Festival and is slated for broad release before the end of the year. David Zeiger spoke with MotherJones.com from the Los Angeles office of his production company, Displaced Films.

MotherJones.com: Talk a little about your history with the GI Movement.

David Zeiger: In the late ‘60s I reached a point where I believed that there was really no alternative for me than to become part of the movement against the war. My opposition to the war had grown very deeply but I hadn’t been really involved in anything. I starting looking around for what was going to be the most effective place and situation to help. I ran into this small group from the GI Movement, some vets and some civilians from Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas. It became obvious to me very quickly that this was the most solid, most direct way to go after the war. It was a situation where people were opposing the war that no one thought would oppose the war. Not just because they were GIs. These were mostly working class guys, guys who had gone into the military out of patriotic motives or because that was just what you did. And they were becoming one of the strongest forces against the war.

MJ: What brought you back to the project, some 35 years later?

DZ: I started making films in the early ‘90s. I always knew that this story was one that needed to be told and had never been told. But the way I always characterized it was, “This is a film that needs to be made but I’m never going to make it.” At the time, it just wasn’t a film that would have much resonance for people. It would be another story from the ‘60s. What prompted me to make the film was September 11, and the War on Terror’s segue into the Iraq War. I saw that this had suddenly become a story that would have current resonance, something that would immediately connect with what’s going on today.

MJ: How did you find the veterans that appear in the film?

DZ: Several of these guys were people I knew because I had been at Fort Hood. Then there were veterans’ organizations like Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans For Peace—I put a call out for stories through their various means of communication. I also ended up [getting] in touch with people nobody had ever heard of before. Their missions were so top secret they were under threat of federal prosecution if they went public with any of their stories. They came to me and basically said, “We want to finally tell our story. We haven’t been able to tell it for 35 years.” We still don’t know what will happen to them. We’ll know when the film is in theaters.

Also, Several books played a big role in keeping memory of the movement alive and giving me the foundation for the film -- especially Soldiers in Revolt by David Cortright, and A Matter of Conscience: GI Resistance Furing the Vietnam War by William Short and Willa Seidenberg.

MJ: Did it take any effort to get the veterans to open up—the public conception of the Vietnam vet is of a man too pained to talk openly about his experiences.

DZ: Yeah, that’s a very big myth. In this situation that was not at all a problem. These are people whose stories had been suppressed and ignored since the war. They knew that their story was a story of the Vietnam War that needed to be told. For most of these veterans, it was more a matter of finally being able to tell their story, stories the overall zeitgeist was against being told. It was not a matter of reluctance.

MJ: The film has already gotten a good deal of interest in Europe. Do you anticipate that domestic interest will be as strong?

DZ: Well, yeah, how to put this? I anticipate that kind of interest, but until the film was made I think U.S. television didn’t quite get how relevant the film is in the current world. It was hard to explain that to people. Now that the film is made we’re getting much stronger interest. A big strength of the film, and what I think is going to bring it into the mainstream, is that this is historical metaphor. We don’t have to say a word about Iraq in the film for it to be clearly identified with Iraq for people. But [because it doesn't mention Iraq], the film can’t be shoved into the category of a propaganda film.

MJ: You mentioned that you were a civilian organizer at Fort Hood during the Vietnam War. At that time, was the civilian public widely aware of the GI Movement?

DZ: The evidence suggests that they were. As you see in the film, there were CBS Nightly News stories about the GI Movement. There is a segment in the film of Walter Cronkite talking about the GI underground press. In the state of Texas, where there was a very large anti-war movement in Austin and Houston, and the center of the Texas movement for a time was at Fort Hood. The armed forces demonstrations were major events for the whole state. I think people knew generally that there was opposition in the military, but they didn’t know the details or how widespread it was. But it was certainly more prominent than people remember it. It has been thoroughly wiped out of any histories of the war.

MJ: How visible was the GI Movement amongst American soldiers in Southeast Asia? Were they aware that their fellow soldiers were protesting the war on bases abroad and in the States?

DZ: Yes. The GI anti-war press was everywhere. Just about every base in the world had an underground paper. Vietnam GI was the first GI paper. It was sent directly to Vietnam from the U.S. in press runs of 5,000 and they were getting spread all over the place because they’d be handed from person to person. Awareness of the GI Movement was at different levels but it was still very widespread.

MJ: How did the GIs manage to write and print these papers, especially when their actions were, presumably, being watched?

DZ: That was where the coffeehouse came in. [The GIs] did the work, for the most part, off base. At the Oleo Strut we had an office that they worked in and we had a printer that would print it for us. Some of these papers would get mimeographed secretly on the military bases because the guys working on them would be clerks and they had access to the proper resources. So there was a range, from something someone had typed up and mimeographed and got out about 500 copies of, to these pretty sophisticated papers like the Fatigue Press at Fort Hood, where we’d have a press run of 10,000 copies. We’d hand them out off base but they’d also be distributed on base. Guys snuck on base and would go through barracks and put them on beds and foot lockers.

One story we didn’t put in the film was about some guys at Fort Lewis near Seattle. They wanted to bring GIs to an anti-war demonstration, but they didn’t have an underground paper yet. They took a bunch of leaflets on base late at night and drove around throwing the leaflets out the window. In the military, if there’s litter on the base the brass doesn’t pick it up; they send out the GIs out to police the base and pick it up. So the next morning they sent several companies out to pick up all this litter and before they realized what this litter was, it was too late. It’s funny: repression breeds innovation.

MJ: The movie talks a lot about the GI coffeehouses and how some of them were attacked and shut down. Did GIs ever claim their First Amendment rights were being thwarted?

DZ: Yes, and there were cases that went all the way to the Supreme Court about that. The Supreme Court fairly consistently ruled that so-called “military necessity” trumped free speech. But there was a tremendous support network of lawyers during the period of the GI Movement who would help challenge these things. There were many cases of GIs challenging the military’s right to not allow them to distribute the underground papers on base. No one won [laughs], but there were a lot of attempts to create change.

MJ: Another thing you discuss in the film is the FTA [“Free the Army” or “Fuck the Army”] tour, a variety show packed with celebrities that wanted to counterbalance the pro-war Bob Hope. Where did the tour perform?

DZ: Well, it was banned from bases. What they typically did was come into military towns that had a support organization like the coffeehouses, and they would either perform at the coffeehouses, or if it was possible, in a larger venue. I know when the FTA show came to Killeen we spent months trying to get an auditorium or even an outdoor site rented to us and no one would do it. So the FTA Tour came to town and performed at the Oleo Strut, which had a capacity of maybe 200 people. Rather than doing two shows that day, they did four. When they did their tour of Asia, which is where we got the footage for the film, they got a lot of outdoor venues and larger venues, but they were never allowed on bases. Keep in mind, these were the top Hollywood stars of the day, Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. They had just come off of Klute, won a ton of awards. But of course they weren’t allowed on any bases.

MJ: And the GIs who saw the shows were free enough that 800 of them could go see the show in one day?

DZ: Yeah. By 1970 and 1971, the combination of the actual organized GI Movement and the general culture of resistance that had emerged inside the military was so strong that you could openly walk around bases wearing whatever anti-war stuff you wanted to wear. Actually, the guys in the U.S. couldn’t do that as much; guys in Vietnam were doing it a lot more. But regardless, that sense of opposition, that sense of FTA, was so strong the army couldn’t completely stomp down on it.

MJ: Your film never mentions John Kerry. Why?

DZ: Because so many people wanted us to put him in [laughs]. That was part of it. Frankly, we didn’t have him in mainly because we didn’t want that to become what the film was about. The film made about his military service during the campaign, Going Upriver, has a lot of footage about his involvement with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, which is also in our film. Ironically, that film was made to help Kerry’s campaign, but if anything, it hurt it. It didn’t win over anyone that was against him to begin with, but people who supported Kerry because of his anti-war stance during Vietnam saw how startlingly far he’s gone in his ultimate betrayal of the stand he took in the 1960s. We thought anything like that would be distraction for this film.

MJ: Why do you think the GI Movement has faded from the public’s memory of Vietnam?

DZ: There’s been a number of factors. There was this whole element in the mid to late ‘70s of people kind of wanting to forget. Hollywood, in depicting the war in the 1970s, never mentioned the GI Movement. Coming Home, which was a very good film in very many ways, started with a much more radical approach to what GIs had gotten into. But by the time the film was finished, it was a much more conciliatory film, and that became the theme that a lot of people latched onto about Vietnam in the ‘70s: Let’s forget it all. Then in the ’80s, the political climate with the Reagan administration became one of rewriting the history of the war. Of course, if you’re going to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War from a right-wing perspective, the GI Movement would be written out completely. Both politically and in every film made at the time, the Movement was literally written out of history.

MJ: The rewriting of history you mention seems to posit the troops as honorable American boys that supported the war, distinct from hippie protestors. Your film makes it clear that that’s a false distinction, and those are false labels. What impact do you think your film will have on people from younger generations whose only experience with Vietnam is a history that has been revised?

DZ: I hope it will really shock people. I want you walk out of the theater thinking, “Holy shit! I’ve been lied to so thoroughly I better take a really close look at this stuff.” And it’s especially important when comparing it to now. I want people to seriously question this idea that opposing the war means opposing the troops. Hopefully they will come to the conclusion that it’s not a given. That’s a political perspective, and it’s a right-wing political perspective, a very pro-war political perspective. And it’s a political perspective that undercuts any serious movement against the war, both among civilians and among GIs. The way the Vietnam War gets summed up is that the Vietnam War was “unpopular,” and that’s what screwed up the GIs. So people today say, “If that’s true, then if the Iraq war is unpopular it’s going to screw up the Iraq GIs.” Well, the Vietnam War wasn’t unpopular. The Vietnam War was criminal.

MJ: One of the most compelling images from the film is the entrance to the Fort Dix stockade in New Jersey, where a sign reads, “Obedience to the Law is Freedom.” Vietnam began a period in American life where that axiom could no longer be taken as faith. What do you think the long-term ramifications of Vietnam are?

DZ: That sign really summarized the Army’s view of military life. The ramifications are, if nothing else, that it’s possible to go up against and defeat a very powerful empire. One of the guys in the film made a point we didn’t end up using: The United States had the biggest army in the world, the best equipped, the best trained, the best fed—and we lost. We got beat by an indigenous force that totally undercut the ability of the United State to get a foothold in their country. And that’s a universal lesson, and that’s a lesson that is extremely dangerous for any country that, despite its protestations, is in fact bent on being a world empire. It’s inspiring for anyone who doesn’t want to live in that sort of situation anymore.

Films mentioned by David Zeiger:

Sir! No Sir!

Going Upriver

Coming Home

Jonathan Stein is an editorial intern at Mother Jones.

E-mail article

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2005" /> The Foundation for National Progress

[American Dream]

For whatever it is worth, some good people near Fort Lewis have put together a new GI Coffeehouse now, as part of their political work. It is called "Coffee Strong", and though I don't know about it in detail, I hear they are doing good work. So I would just point out that this is all living history, very much relevant to today...

[JackRiddler]

.

The US presence had to be withdrawn because the troops stopped fighting. Because mutiny was widespread enough that an incredible 250 or more officers were killed by their own troops in 1970, according to Pentagon estimates.

It wasn't just that the anti-war movement of the 1960s-70s was better conceived, or the people were better. (I would say as children they were brainwashed on the whole more brutally but less skilfully.) It was a different time, and the masters of war learned from the experience to make sure it would never happen again. Well, not in the same way!

When I posted about Sir! No Sir! on DU, it got this response from one poster:

I remember watching film of an entire US platoon refusing orders to advance in Vietnam
That was on the 5:00 news.

The war ended soon after that.

Don

http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... 10#3344356

Which prompted me to consider why things are different today, so I replied:

Two remarkable things about the incident you describe, besides the fact of mutiny:

It was on film. (Imagine how widespread.)

It was on television. (So widespread the media couldn't spin it.)

If that doesn't say the army will no longer murder for madness, what does?

This was the key success of the antiwar movement; not at home, but with the military itself.

You would hope the power elite would react by seeking a path other than war. But instead, this mutiny of the troops is why, after Vietnam:

- no more draft: volunteer army with "career incentives"

- strategy shift: 30-year move to remote-control killing ("the revolution in military affairs") and overkill ("shock and awe")

- cultural conservatism & neoliberal economics: aiming at the people as the enemy

- divide and conquer: rambo mythology of the disaffected veteran "spat upon by hippies"

- divide and conquer: mythology that war opposition was solely a middle class phenomenon (belying the truth of mainly working class opposition, for example at state colleges far more than in the Ivies)

- salami tactic: gradual rehabilitation of war through PR actions dressed as great victories (Grenada, Libya bombing, Panama...)

- generational propaganda: the Sixties were uncool, icky, drug-deluded, diseased, full of unwashed hippies with unruly beards and hairy-armpit women in the Manson family (ps - i love hairy armpits, no misunderstandings please); example: Forrest Gump! The key here was to re-cast the youth movement of the Sixties as OLD PEOPLE (even while they were still in their 30s), a weakness to which all youth movements are susceptible (since people age), while casting the right-wing as youthful and cool.

- Roll-out of the new way of war and propaganda: '91 Gulf war, a coming-out party

- tighter restrictions on press in war: integrated overall media/disinformation strategy, leading to "embedding," punctuated by attacks on unruly press ("accidental" Al Jazeera hits in Kabul and Baghdad)

- total homefront perception management: Pentagon shills as TV "analysts"

- recruitment propaganda and war entertainment on TV: slings less and less bullshit about patriotism and values and instead focuses on the sensation, excitement, thrill-in-the-moment rock-and-roll coolness of war or "counterterror," with important trend within that to series full of heavily-armed babes. (Pentagon keeps its tentacles in Hollywood, helps suppress 70s antiwar trend.) Related: certain trends in video games.

- massive use of the politics of fear (9/11 exploitation, "war on terror," homeland panic, WMD, Iraq a direct threat to strike US which was never claimed of Vietnam)

- more complete and yet more subtle surveillance and control of opposition and, for that matter, everything: panopticon

- turn to outright mercenary armies, outsourced military and intel;

- next step, especially if recruitment drops off: prisoners to be warriors

- (re-)discovery of liberal humanitarian imperialism: the modern "white man's burden" ideology aimed especially at a type of people who might post on this board. Examples: "Save Darfur," bomb Belgrade, if only we'd invaded Rwanda (we did), if only we'd invaded Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq, etc. A civil war in Sudan is a genocide calling for intervention, but the long-planned genocidal destruction of Iraq as a nation with millions being killed as a direct consequence of US actions is a "civil war" that "we" should not have "stumbled into" out of "incompetence."

- Also interesting is the chickenhawk phenomenon: you simply never had this before, America's leading warmongers were always former military commanders, preferably of the kind who had massacred Indians or at least broken up the Bonus Army. Related to this, the failure of the "draft-dodger" meme to stick to Clinton or GW Bush.

- War is television.

- Every day life is war.

- War is in a permanent nowhere.



.

[Lottie McLotsaluck]

I have been reading a wonderful book called "Nixonland" by Rick Perlstein. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perlstein
He goes into the whole Nixon landscape with a shovel. There are times reading this book that I feel like recoiling from the evil of Nixon and his confederates after all these many years! It seems to me that Nixon was a pseudo-being of some sort who didn't have the moral sense of even a Goebbels, Stalin or Pol Pot. If we had anything resembling a true and free media in this nation, this despicable fraud and coward would never have achieved the highest office in the land. How many people looked the other way, I wonder, during Nixon's rise to the top? Perlstein starts to go into the Moratorium strike and the Nixon admins response to it on page 418. It was what the Nixon team feared the most- a peacful and quiet protest by very average Americans-for most of them it would be the first time they demonstrated in their lives. I thought this information would be relevant not only towards today's Occupy Movement, Indignants and the like, but also interesting just for the sake of history itself. I would like to add more information from this book to relevant threads at RI (and to this subject here too) as time goes by. Not feeling so great physically lately, plus I am a lousy typist, so it may take quite some time to do this!

From pages 424-25: "Two precisely incommensurate propositions: that either patience or impatience with the war was the road to national dishonor. On the fifteenth, the American people could vote on that referendum with their feet. Richard Nixon lost. Life called it "the largest expression of public dissent ever seen in this country" Two million Americans protested-most for the first time in their lives.

Everywhere, black armbands, everywhere, flags at half-staff, church services, film showings, teach -ins, neighbor- to -neighbor canvasses. In North Newton, Kansas, a bell tolled every four seconds, each clang memorializing a fallen soldier; in Columbia, Maryland, an electronic sign counted the day's war deaths. Milwaukee staged a downtown noontime funeral procession. Hastings College, an 850-student Presbyterian school in Nebraska, suspended opeations. Madison, Ann Arbor, and New Haven were only a few of the college towns to draw out a quarter of their populations or more (New Haven's Vietnam Moratorium Committee had called up every name in the city phone book). The nation's biggest collge towns brought out one hundred thousand souls in Boston Common. A young Rhodes Scholar out of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, got up a demonstration of one thousand people in front of the U.S. embassy in London."

Phew-must take a break! Will hopefully be back soon to add more to this!