When did it become fashionable to diminish the accomplishments of Vietnam War-era protesters by accusing them of inflated self-regard and delusions about what their activism accomplished?
In my view, the situation in the Mideast is more nuanced than the United States’ involvement in Vietnam ever was. Israel’s horrific response notwithstanding, I fear that many pro-Palestinian student activists are naïvely unwilling to confront the role Hamas and its allies have played in the conflict.
But telling students that their agitation is pointless or merely performative because some folks have doubts about the effectiveness of the anti-Vietnam War movement is wrong.
“The nostalgic champions of the campus protests of the ’60s would have Americans believe they were a heroic success, stopping the Vietnam War,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. “But what they actually helped achieve was Richard Nixon’s election and seven more years of war.”
There is certainly some truth there.
Americans chose Republican Richard Nixon over Democrat Hubert Humphrey in 1968, at a time when urban uprisings and all kinds of political turbulence had exhausted voters. The Democratic Party was in disarray after President Lyndon B. Johnson declined to run again, Robert Kennedy was assassinated and the peace candidate, Eugene McCarthy, failed in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Nixon, after all, famously courted that “silent majority” of presumably politically moderate Americans.
But blaming antiwar protesters for Nixon’s decision to protract the war in his misguided search for “peace with honor” and with his clandestine bombing of Cambodia is unfair.
And using that conclusion to critique today’s student protesters, who have upended college campuses with their pro-Palestinian protests and encampments, trivializes the precious American right to protest.
After Nixon was elected, the antiwar movement gained a legitimacy that led to real change.
In response to a spate of civil disobedience, including organized draft card burnings, Nixon acknowledged that the deeply unpopular draft had to end. By 1972, a year before the Paris Peace Accords ended America’s role in the war, more U.S. men had filed for conscientious objector status than were actually drafted. By some estimates, 100,000 young men are believed to have left the country rather than fight in a morally indefensible conflict that had exacted a terrible cost in American and Vietnamese blood and treasure.
Veterans like John Kerry, a Navy Swift boat commander horrified by what he’d seen and experienced in Vietnam, came home and campaigned against the war. How could anyone deny the effect Vietnam Veterans Against the War had on public sentiment?
Here are some other ways antiwar protesters of that era helped change this country for the better:
Since the founding, the voting age in this country was 21. The idea that you could kill or die for your country but not have a voice in its politics finally became untenable during the Vietnam War. The 26th Amendment was ratified on July 1, 1971.
Americans’ blind faith in their government was forever shaken by the release of the Pentagon Papers, purloined and made public by Daniel Ellsberg, a onetime military analyst turned antiwar activist, and The New York Times and The Washington Post. The report revealed to the public that the government had systematically lied about the war for years.
As someone whose family was active in the antiwar movement, I recognize my own bias here.
Will the current protest movement have an effect on American foreign policy and President Biden’s support for Israel’s devastating and disproportionate retaliation for the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas? Perhaps, like the Vietnam War protests of the last century, there will be short-term backlash followed by long-term positive change.
Claiming the protests are misguided, or doing more harm than good, is presumptuous in the extreme.
Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
