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By Bill Zimmerman
The Vietnam antiwar movement, famous for its sound and fury, deserves credit for more. We were the first mass movement against a war in American history and one of its great moral crusades, yet most Americans recall only enormous protests and social chaos. In fact, the 10-year movement, in which I played a role, was a complex phenomenon that evolved strategically as circ*mstances changed. It can be broken down into four overlapping stages.
The first stage, in 1964 and 1965, was led by two groups: left-wing activists organized into peace groups opposed to the Cold War and American intervention abroad, and college students who had come of age during the Southern civil rights movement and had seen how readily the government could divert its gaze from injustice. When the war expanded in 1965, the fledgling movement adopted two strategic goals: to give activists enough knowledge about Vietnam to be able to draw others into action, and to normalize opposition, since many Americans were hesitant to oppose their own country in a time of war.
The peace groups educated the public and the press. The students invented a new way to train activists, the remarkably successful campus teach-ins, and between March and June, over 120 were held across the country. Public protests were organized to normalize opposition. In April, Students for a Democratic Society drew a surprising 20,000 to the first. In November, the peace organization SANE sponsored another, with a similar turnout. By the end of 1965, this first stage had largely succeeded. Activists gained a deep knowledge of Vietnam and the war, and protests, while still small, did normalize opposition despite accusations that they were un-American. Seeds of doubt planted in the press and the public would flower later.
But the war only escalated. In early 1966, troop deployments, American casualties and draft calls dramatically increased, and college students and their middle-class families, for whom military service was not on the agenda, took notice. Their self-interest triggered a second stage of the antiwar movement, with much bigger and more numerous protests. Establishment voices, including Senator Robert Kennedy and the influential columnist Walter Lippmann, spoke out against the war. Senator J. William Fulbright held televised hearings that brought antiwar views directly into American homes. Throughout 1966 and 1967, leaders from politics, science, medicine, academia, entertainment, the press and even business announced their opposition to the war.
In this second stage, our strategic objectives were to unite various strands of antiwar opposition behind widespread draft resistance and to build opposition to force a political end to the war. Large protests sprang up across the country. In April 1967, a milestone was reached when 500,000 demonstrated against the war in New York, the largest such gathering in history. Self-interested draft avoidance evolved into morally driven draft resistance. The thousands of young men, including Muhammad Ali, unwilling to kill and ready to sacrifice themselves to incarceration or a life of exile moved people of all ages. Their cause inspired others to more forcefully oppose the war.
At the same time, a growing split between protest and resistance became evident. On Oct. 21, 1967, 100,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington for a demonstration. But this time, 50,000 broke away to join the illegal March on the Pentagon, more Americans ready to commit nonviolent civil disobedience than at any time in history. Thousands broke through military police lines, and a few even penetrated the Pentagon itself. Hundreds were arrested, many of them younger, angrier and more frustrated than the men and women who had led the first wave of opposition.
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