Regarding the claim that returning Vietnam vets were vilified, I’d like to point out that serving in Vietnam served to radicalize many of them. Being in Vietnam, seeing what was happening, led many otherwise middle-of-the-road young men to realize the horror of the war and to become cynical about what those in power were telling them. They came back to join and lead the protests.
This has always been a specious claim. I don’t know if there’s a single confirmed incident of the alleged spitting on Vietnam vets other than figuratively by the government.
I agree with you.
Did the protests have that much to do with it? I thought Cronkite “turned” when he saw the (out of strategic context) footage of the Tet Offensive. IIRC, on the air, he said he was convinced there was no way South Vietnam could win the war, off the air, I believe what he said was, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!” (and in fact, we were - what Cronkite saw was akin to watching the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, or the first wave at Omaha Beach, and assuming the Germans had us on the ropes).
While I think there were some incidents - either that, or all of the cases mentioned in Bob Greene’s book Homecoming by the people who claimed that it happened to them were fictional - those would have been “veterans” just arriving from Vietnam and still in uniform.
Thr number of countries with conscription has gradually declined. France ended it in 2001. So it is hard to say. But it probably would have lasted a lot longer.
I’m wondering if the protests made draft evasion more thinkable. If so, all our recent presidents might have been veterans. I guess we would have left Afghanistan and Iraq sooner.
I tend to think that small historical changes would have unknown big effects on subsequent history. On the other hand, if there were just as many anti-war books and op-Ed’s and films and letters to the editor and political speeches, but just no demonstrations, maybe the effects of the anti-war movement would have been similar.
The quote is supposed to be LBJs after he saw the Cronkite documentary. It’s probably a media myth. There’s no evidence he said any of the many versions of the quote. Nevertheless, it persists because it says what nobody doubts is a truth.
Cronkite’s documentary came after he went to Vietnam after the Tet offensive to see for himself. All the administration mouthpieces had been forceful and adamant that we had the war won and the Viet Cong defeated. That we were able to beat them back after being surprised meant little. Cronkite did some foot-on-the-ground reporting as well as listening to the generals acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of fresh troops were needed. He was personally shocked because he naively believed that the country’s leaders wouldn’t lie so boldly and crassly. Here’s a good article on his turnaround.
He ended by saying the unthinkable.
“[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate . . . [I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
The country now knew that the daily reports were simply lies. Most of them didn’t want to believe that. Many went to their graves not believing that. But 11% of the voters stopped supporting the war, making the 1968 election 50/50, one of the closest in history.
No one thing is normally the cause for public opinion shifting and that’s true for the war and for the 1968 election and for Johnson quitting. Everything went wrong at once. (A 1968 timeline, with much bad and some good.) Look at one term presidents like Hoover and Carter and Bush and Trump. Everything was going wrong at the moment that their terms were ending. Everything was a cause of voters switching parties.
Being right in the middle of that generation and having done my share of non-violent protesting, I’d have to say what really turned the sentiment for the war around was the parents of roughly seven million first-wave male Baby Boomers turning 18 during 1964-1970 and becoming eligible for the draft. Our fathers may have gone off to fight World War II willingly, and our mothers may have supported them, but that didn’t mean they wanted their sons to do the same.
Paywalled, alas.
Wow, thanks, Harpo!
I lived through the 60s. We learned not to bogart those internet links.
Ha! Yes.
I especially like the last bit, about how certain media moments had impacts that contradict certain realities of their creation:
'That photo incited revulsion, depicting a callous disregard for human life. Except that the executed fighter had just killed the police chief’s close friend and the friend’s family. Adams, whose photograph won the Pulitzer Prize, later said he felt his photo unfairly tarnished the police chief.
And was it really a “living-room war”? When Michael Arlen coined the term, he didn’t say that television brought the reality of the war into people’s homes. He argued the opposite. He said that, because of the scale of a television, the war is “a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, and trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.”’
The Arlen comment becomes pretty diminished when you realize it was in a 1000-word television review column in the Fall of 1966. His piece actually was a complaint that the networks weren’t doing that much to cover the war. Obviously, that changed dramatically over the next few years.
In the introduction to his collection, The Living Room War, Arlen wrote:
…the conventional version of events: namely, that the ghastliness of the war, as revealed on the nightly news, provided the crucial leverage for the antiwar movement that helped end it. It seems to me that that this perspective is neither more or less correct than the equally considered view that prevailed among many intelligent people at the time: that television’s banalization or routinization of the war had the result of numbing the audience into a state of acquiescence before government policy.
This smacks to me as a “none of my friends voted for Nixon” ignorance of the greater American audience away from the Upper West Side.
Also, one of Arlen’s subsequent books about television was called The Camera Age.
He has to defend what was his second column ever. I don’t.
There may well have been isolated incidents as described. There’s still no reason this represented the attitude of any significant portion of the public, or the stated intent of any organized group of any size. The number of actual cases purported is small, and lacking much corroboration. The wider treatment of Vietnam veterans returning to home was awful, not just that there were no cheering crowds to provide a heroes welcome. The war has become a distasteful subject, discussion of the war with vets was uncomfortable for both them and everyone else, and sometimes they had gone overseas with feeling they were acting with honor and returning home to find the public had a different viewpoint that they had no knowledge of.
But a point that may be missed today- the protests were not so much to “end the war” but to end US youth from dying in what was perceived as a “bad” war. So, the protests could do something- the President could pull the troops back, Congress could end US participation, etc.
There are lots of protests where there is no achievable goal- where the protests are basically pointless, like 'ending world hunger" or “ending all war”.
The anti vietnam protests had an achievable goal, and they helped achieve it.
While some protestors only wanted to end the Viet Nam war, quite a lot wanted to end war in general.
I don’t think that’s achievable as long as we’re this species. But I do think we’ll have a lot more people killed in wars if we stop trying to achieve it.
And yet most of them stopped protesting the moment the draft ended.
Did the USA have another active war going on at the time?
And quite a lot of them kept on protesting nuclear armament; which seemed at the time more applicable.
The draft ended at the beginning of 1973, after Nixon’s landslide re-election. To be fair, by 1973 troop strength had fallen 95% from the peak, and 99% of American soldiers had already been killed by then so nationwide protests would have been meaningless. The American war was essentially over.