For those of you alive back then, did the anti-Vietnam-war protests have any effect on policies, how many people were sent to Vietnam, the decision to leave Vietnam, etc? Was there any material change due to the protests?
You would think it would. I do not believe the government cares one whit what it citizens want.
It did achieve a lot of us feeling like a community, joined together on that hippie journey.
I think it convinced LBJ not to run for reelection, which led directly to RMN being elected which delayed the end of the war by a couple years, most likely. It caused RFK to run for president, which led to his assassination and quite possibly led to jr run for president and possibly to the election of DJT. It’s butterflies all the way down.
In the short run, the protests convinced my parents to vote for Nixon.
In the long run, the protests convinced my parents to vote for Reagan.
I think the deaths of the 58,000 American troops was a much bigger factor.
If the only cultural influence about that war had been Green Berets (the movie) type of propaganda, those deaths would not have been as effective in creating a general dislike of the war. The protests had a huge cultural influence, allowing respected non-political figures like Walter Cronkite to openly criticize the war.
As noted above, these things did not lead to the desired ends, making LBJ not seek re-election and leading to Nixon’s election. Nixon somehow kept the thing going for 6 more years (incompetence? some diabolical reason? I don’t know) whereas if LBJ had been re-elected, he could have aggressively pursued a solution for the end of the war, and then whichever Democrat ran for President in 1972 would not have been tarred with that brush.
“making LBJ not seek re-election”
How did it lead to his decision not to seek re-election?
This.
I think it also had an impact on the attitude that it was right and proper and good for the young men to always have a war for every generation to fight in. Though WWI may have done a good bit in that direction some time previously.
Would he have, though? if there had been no protests?
We might not have had the Twenty-Sixth Amendment without the protests. 18-21 year olds (half eligible for the draft) couldn’t be told to “work through the system” as an alternative to protesting until the 26th was adopted.
well it did end the general use of the draft which the armed forces had been using to bolster forces even when peacetime
Impossible to be sure, but I’m pretty sure he was unhappy about the way the war was going, and rather disillusioned with some of his advisors. Of course, it seems to me that Nixon also had the opportunity to pursue an aggressive solution for peace, but instead he ran the war for longer than LBJ did. And protests didn’t seem to have any effect on his attitude towards the war.
They may have lowered the voting age to 18. Maybe. What mostly did it was young men being drafted and dying in Vietnam.
I dont think the protests did much, not even LBJ. It was the average middle aged American voter getting tired of the war, and the casualties. In some ways the Yippies firmed up support for the war.
College students yelling and throwing a fit generally are not much of a concern to Politicians.
By the late winter of 1968 Walter Cronkite had joined the anti- war groups saying he no longer supported the war effort. LBJ’s polls fell so low he decided not to run. I read somewhere that one of LBJ’s aides said:…“If we have lost Cronkite then we have lost middle America”
So the protests did have a concrete effect: change in POTUS. Given that Nixon prolonged the war, the effect ended up being the opposite of what the protestors wanted (though I guess that was hard to predict a priori), but there was a tangible consequence of the protests on the war.
I had not known that LBJ’s decision not to run was due to the anti-war effort.
He had to listen to kids chanting “Hey, hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?”
We can’t take all the credit. Johnson was upset that after the giant successes of his Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights bill and the Great Society measures, the war robbed him of the well-earned pleasures of his achievements. Bit by bit, the endless meat grinder of what he knew by then was an unwinnable war eroded the public’s opinion of him and destroyed what he thought would be his legacy.
Cronkite’s special on Vietnam aired on February 27. On March 12, Eugene McCarthy won 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, a truly shocking number against a sitting president, causing RFK to announce a few days later. Johnson’s resignation speech was on March 31.
Johnson, an exceptionally canny politician - we have no comparisons today, saw what was coming. It would be humiliating to have to fend off real competitors for the office he won with 61% of the vote in 1964. Another summer of race riots were certain. Colleges were in revolt. Parents hated that their kids were being sent off to die - 20,000 by the end of 1967 and counting - for nothing they could justify. Did he stay in office - he was sure to win the nomination and almost sure to win the election - and take four more years of misery and hatred or let somebody else sink waist deep into the Big Muddy? He choose the latter, even though it surprised everybody in the country.
Nor did it work. Historians are upgrading his reputation but most of my generation associated him with nothing but a losing, lying war. Even his gains in civil rights were thwarted by Nixon’s Southern Strategy so that 60 years later we’re still refighting those battles. Nixon appealed to the worst elements in society and rode them to a crushing victory over a left that was totally at war within itself, though with a much lower body count. Did Johnson suspect this? Probably not. He, like everyone sane, hated Nixon, and would have fought to crush the pissant and all he stood for, or didn’t stand for.
Nixon was able to turn the later protests into right-wing support through demonizing the voices who happened to be correct. Johnson probably never would have done that. Probably. All we know is what actually happened.
Because I’m curious about such things, why did you think Johnson quit? I always want to know what younger people understand about history.
Watch this movie about what it did in my home town:
Interesting take. I figured LBJ would have lost the general election had he continued. At best the added stress would have led to the heart attack that killed him having happened sooner. What would have happened had LBJ won in '68? My best guess is that Nixon would also be done for as a twice loser. Reagan runs and wins in '72 and '76, using the same Southern Strategy that Nixon used. Nixon, despite all his flaws, did accomplish a lot of things. Things an ailing LBJ and a '70s era Reagan wouldn’t have. We would have no EPA, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and China would likely be an even bigger problem than they currently are.
So the protesters saved us from a future in which Reagan still does all of the worst stuff that Nixon did (minus Watergate 
), but without any of the redeeming progressive actions that Nixon took. I’d say overall we came out ahead.
Johnson’s resignation was an immediate result. Over more time a larger portion of public turned against our involvement in the war. The public was largely united in the concept of fighting communism in the world initially. The anti-war movement put an end to that. Some of it was counter productive but the part that worked was gaining the hearts and minds of the families of men drafted into service to fight this war. Unfortunately the shooting of protestors at Kent State was the major turning point. Just as the case now, people question the motives behind decisions purportedly made for the benefit of all when they result in the great detriment to a few. In the US people weren’t that concerned with the effects of the war on the Vietnamese people, that was largely unseen. Once tragedy that people could see and feel at home occurred they reconsidered the situation.
I don’t know about the politics of the time, but some combination of the news coverage, the protests, and the general increased public consciousness of the war itself, versus just home-front effects, had a profound effect on US politicians’ willingness to embark on military adventures for about ten years, and even then, they were careful to manage the press, rather than let them do what they would. Something about Vietnam and the way the press reported on it convinced the military to change the way they did business w.r.t. the press.
Think Grenada, Panama, 1st Gulf War, Invasion of Iraq, early stages of Afghan War. All of them were very carefully stage-managed as far as the media was concerned, and that wasn’t really a thing in WWII, Korea or Vietnam.
In addition, the effects on the returning soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines of the protests and the popular feeling about the war was something that also had a long-lasting effect. All this “Thank you for your service” stuff we see these days is a direct reaction to the way that returning Vietnam vets were basically either disregarded or vilified, and a large segment of the population recognized that the individual vets weren’t responsible for the war itself, and didn’t deserve to be mistreated as a result. And they changed that attitude at least by the time of the 1st Gulf War, maybe even before that.
Among the other things mentioned above, it led to using an “all-volunteer army,” i.e., not using the draft for foreign military adventures, as much of the protest was about the draft.