Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  On the morning of the 21st, over 100,000 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial. Placard slogans ranged from 'Negotiate' to 'Where Is Oswald When We Need Him?' – a reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy. Then, with helicopters buzzing overhead, they headed off towards Arlington Bridge. Meanwhile, with a secret service helicopter hovering over the White House, President Johnson invited journalists to watch him working in the Rose Garden. He made a show of being unconcerned, believing the demonstration would be broken up too late to get much coverage in the Sunday papers.

  Once the march reached the other side of the bridge, a group carrying a Vietcong flag peeled off and made a dash through the woods to the Pentagon, where they were surrounded by MPs and US Marshals. Another group tore down a barrier and got into the building, only to be beaten up by waiting troops.

  When the main group reached the building they appealed to the troops guarding it to come and join them. A protester from Berkeley put flowers down the barrels of their guns. Abbie Hoffman and his wife, high on acid and wearing tall Uncle Sam hats, made love in front of the troops. Others followed suit shouting, 'We'd rather f*** than fight'.

  Young women clawed at the zippers of the soldiers and offered to take them into the woods if they changed sides. One reportedly accepted the offer, but was bundled away by officers. More than 200 draft cards were burnt.

  Sharpshooters lined the Pentagon roof and, watching from their office windows, were Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who by that time was regularly seen weeping in his office, and defence analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the man who leaked the 'Pentagon Papers'. Many Pentagon officials were unnerved by the situation, knowing their own children were among the demonstrators.

  As dusk fell, most protesters began to drift away, but around 400 stayed. Shortly before midnight, a V-shaped phalanx of troops came out kicking and clubbing the protesters. Women were beaten in the face with rifle butts. Rubin urged the protesters to fight back and they began setting fire to pieces of wood and hurling them at the Marshals. Though more moderate voices spoke up and some protesters withdrew, others who had been camping out in the woods returned. The following day some 2,000 protesters were still besieging the Pentagon. Rioting continued sporadically for two days. TV viewers saw coverage of the 82nd Airborne's action on the Potomac interspersed with the 1st Air Cavalry's action in Vietnam on the nightly news.

  In all 683 people were arrested, including two UPI reporters and the novelist Norman Mailer who immortalised the event in his book The Armies of the Night. Fifty-one were given jail terms ranging up to 35 days and fined $8,000 in all. There were numerous injuries but no deaths. Mailer's presence in the anti-war movement was important. He was no pacifist and had come to prominence with his first novel The Naked and the Dead, based on his experiences in the Pacific, hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of World War II. With the death of Ernest Hemingway in 1961, Mailer had inherited his macho mantle. But instead of celebrating this war he became deeply pessimistic about it. In 1967, he published the novel Why Are We in Vietnam?. Strangely, it is not set in Vietnam at all. The action takes place on a hunting trip in Alaska. However, the book explores men's quest to prove their masculinity and the relish that human beings take in killing – issues that seemed to be possessing America as a nation in its attitude to the war at the time.

  In The Armies of the Night, published in 1968, Mailer took a more direct approach. The first half of the book records his first-hand experiences during the anti-war demonstration in Washington, DC in October 1967. The second half gives a detailed history of the origins and organisation of the demonstration. Although this book could be dismissed as a piece of supercharged journalism, Mailer lent his intellectual authority to the fight against the war in the most public way he knew. But he was preaching to the choir. His influence extended only to the students and intellectuals who were already opposed to America's intervention in Vietnam. Support for the war came from blue-collar workers and middle America, who neither read nor cared about the musings of Norman Mailer.

  The television and newspapers were still largely pro-war and the media roundly condemned the protesters as 'extremists' and 'troublemakers', insisting that, as a whole, the demonstration would stiffen Hanoi's resolve. Johnson claimed that he had a secret report showing that the demonstration had been choreographed by Communists. Indeed, some of its leaders had met with Vietcong and North Vietnamese delegates at a conference in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in September. But the demonstration had already been planned by then, and when Johnson asked the FBI and CIA to substantiate his claims, they came up with nothing.

  The march on the Pentagon was only one of many protests that broke out across the US in 1967. There were more violent clashes in New York City, and Oakland, now the home of the militant African-American separatist Black Panther Party, continued to be a centre of protest with 125 demonstrators arrested on 21 October and a further 268 on 19 December. Anti-war demonstrations were not confined to the US: protest spread around the world, with anti-war feeling running especially high in Britain. On 4 July 1965, after a demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square, a homemade bomb exploded against the back door of the American Express offices in the Haymarket, less than half a mile away. In October, two days of protest in London led to a march on the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square, where 78 were arrested. Thousands more protested in Trafalgar Square. In July 1966, the British House of Commons passed a motion supporting American policy in Vietnam, but disassociating Britain from the bombing raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. But, while the government were equivocal, young people were vehemently opposed to the war and a full-scale riot took place in Grosvenor Square in March 1968 when 50 protesters were injured and 300 arrested. Undeterred, 50,000 anti-war protesters took to the streets of London in October after a heated row had developed in the United Nations when Secretary General U Thant backed a seemingly anti-US resolution.

  In May 1965 in Sydney, Australia, 50 demonstrators were arrested just days after Australia had increased its contingent fighting in Vietnam to 1,300. Whenever President Johnson travelled abroad, he was met with protest, with demonstrations in Berlin, Rome, Brussels, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Paris and Tokyo. When Johnson visited Australia in December 1967, the authorities were barely able to guarantee his safety. On one occasion, his car was splashed with green paint. Violent anti-war demonstrations broke out in January 1967 when South Vietnam's President Ky visited Australia and New Zealand, who had also sent troops to Vietnam, and in Sweden, an International War Crimes Tribunal, backed financially by British philosopher Bertrand Russell, condemned the US for war crimes.

  Another key element in the growth of the anti-war movement, both internationally and domestically, was the hippies. Also known as flower children, adherents wore their hair long, smoked marijuana, dropped LSD, believed in peace and free love, and wore colourful and eccentric clothes. Although they seemed to burst upon the world fully formed in 1967, the summer of love, they were a development of an older American youth movement that had been subsumed by the invasion of British music and fashions in 1963. Hippies had their roots in the Beat Generation of the late 1940s and 1950s whose rootless, bohemian philosophy was summed up by Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road. The book, which details freewheeling journeys across America, ends in San Francisco, where Kerouac moved to live with Neal Cassady, the model for Dean Moriarty, the hero of the novel. And the poet Alan Ginsberg wrote the quintessential Beat poem 'Howl' in San Francisco.

  In 1961, Neal Cassady hitched up with another novelist, Ken Kesey, who was living in Palo Alto. Together they began experimenting with the drug lysergic acid diathylamide (LSD or acid) a hallucinogenic drug synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman in 1938 as a possible cure for migraine (it was not illegal at the time). In the summer of 1963, with the royalties from Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – later made into a successful film starring Jack Nicholson – Kesey and his circle moved to a big log house in the hills of La H
onda, northwest of Palo Alto, where they continued their experiments with drugs.

  In 1964, Cassady, Kesey, and Kesey's pal Ken Babbs – recently returned from active service as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam – began calling themselves the Merry Pranksters and decided to take their drug-fuelled philosophy on the road. They bought an old school bus, painted it with swirling 'psychedelic' patterns, and renamed it 'The Magic Bus'. On there rear of the bus was a sign reading: 'CAUTION: WEIRD LOAD'. On the front the destination board read: 'FURTHUR' – with two 'U's. They set off across America, with Kesey and Babbs playing whistles and flutes on the roof, filming their journey as they went.

  In Millbrook, New York, they dropped in unannounced on acid-guru Timothy Leary. A former Harvard lecturer and author of The Psychedelic Experience, he advised his followers to 'turn on, tune in, drop out'. However, the Merry Pranksters found Leary and his League for Spiritual Discovery altogether too solemn and headed back to San Francisco, where the use of LSD was spreading throughout the city. Folk music, which had been the standard fare of the Beats, was overtaken by the sound of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Young acid-users shed their sombre beatnik garb for the crazier clothes and long hairstyles imported by the British bands. As LSD seemed to offer some sort of spiritual enlightenment, a Christ-like look with flowing locks and robes became fashionable.

  San Francisco bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Flamin' Groovies took LSD and developed the psychedelic sound of Acid Rock. A band called the Warlocks took LSD at the Pranksters 'Acid Tests' at La Honda in 1964 and became the Grateful Dead. These Acid Tests were prolonged parties that attracted a mixed group: a gay New York Jewish intellectual such as Alan Ginsberg could be seen dropping acid with Hell's Angels from Oakland. The scene was recorded in Tom Wolfe's 1968 book of new journalism The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

  Beat veterans used the pejorative term 'hippies' – a term used by African-American musicians to described white beatnik hanger-ons on the jazz scene – to dismiss the middle-class drop-outs slumming it in North Beach, a term the hippies embraced. Their burgeoning counterculture spread across the Bay to Berkeley where the Free Speech Movement was under way. When Ken Kesey was invited to speak at the anti-war demonstration in Berkeley on 16 October 1965, he turned up in the magic bus covered in military symbols and outraged the earnest anti-war protesters with a mocking speech. However, the Berkeley band Country Joe and the Fish, who became famous for the anti-Vietnam song 'Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag', embraced the psychedelic music of San Francisco and hippie-ness spread to the campus.

  The hippies borrowed their 'peace' philosophy from Martin Luther King and the anti-war movement. They looked to the East for enlightenment after the Beatles went there to meditate with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968. Marijuana use came from the Beats and the philosophy 'free love' came from utopian religious groups of the nineteenth century, the modernist movement of the early twentieth century, and the availability of reliable contraception in the form of the recently introduced pill. Hippies summed up their philosophy in the slogan 'Make Love Not War'.

  Hippie culture began to find expression in 'underground' magazines and newspapers and celebrated at 'Be-In' in San Francisco's Golden Gate park on 14 January 1967, where thousands of young people openly took drugs and bands played for free. Similar events were organised across America and around the world in the summer of 1967.

  The 'Death of the Hippie' in San Francisco was prematurely announced in October 1966 with a march down Haight Street. Elsewhere hippies were very much alive. In 1968, hippies went mainstream with the musical Hair and declared independence with the founding of the 'Woodstock Nation' at a free music festival in upstate New York in August 1969. Hippies believed that they lived at the dawning of a new age – the age of Aquarius, dedicated to peace and love, a dream which would be soured when a young black man was stabbed to death just four months later at a free festival given by the Rolling Stones at Altamont, California, and the nightmare hippie Charles Manson and his murderous 'family' moved into the limelight. Nevertheless, the hippie creed of peace, love, and nonviolent protests was a focus for young people who found themselves alienated from their parent's support of the war and it briefly found political expression in the Youth International Party – the Yippies – founded by the organisers of the march on the Pentagon, Rubin and Hoffman.

  Although most people in America still condemned the anti-war protesters, the demonstrations began to have a political effect. Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee William Fulbright, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Senator Eugene McCarthy began to express their doubts about the war. President Johnson held firm, but his Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the chief architect of the war, turned against it. The commander on the ground in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, insisted the war could not be won without a massive escalation, which would involve an extension of the already unpopular draft. With rioting on the streets, it seemed plain that this was an escalation that the country would not bear. McNamara decided that there was no alternative but to withdraw. He tendered his resignation in November 1967, but agreed to stay on until February 1968 to maintain the illusion of loyalty. But Fulbright was free to speak out, and on 8 December 1967, he did so, denouncing the conflict as an 'immoral and unnecessary war,' adding, 'Far from demonstrating America's willingness and ability to save beleaguered governments from communist insurgencies, all that we are demonstrating in Vietnam is America's willingness to use its B-52s, its napalm, and all other ingenious weapons of “counter-insurgency” to turn a small country into a charnel house'.

  American public opinion turned decisively against the war following the Tet Offensive in January 1968. Although the Vietcong's six-hour occupation of the compound of the US Embassy in Saigon was a suicide mission, it showed the American people that, after nearly three years of war, no progress had been made. People were particularly appalled when they saw South Vietnam's police chief Van Ngoc Loan blow a Vietcong suspect's brains out on the TV news. If Loan was an example of the kind of people they were supporting in the Saigon government, perhaps America was on the wrong side. In fact, the victim had just murdered one of Loan's best friends and had knifed his entire family. Loan went on the run, and ended up in the US, running a pizza parlour in the Burke suburb of Washington, DC.

  Saigon Chief of Police Van Ngoc Loan's shooting of a VC suspect was captured live on camera by CBS, shocking US TV viewers back home.

  Walter Cronkite's public reassessment of the war put the final nail in Johnson's coffin. When Senator Robert Kennedy declared he would run for the Democratic presidential nomination four days after Senator Eugene McCarthy's spectacular showing in the New Hampshire primary, both the peace protesters and, to some extent, middle America breathed a collective sigh of relief. Here was another charismatic Kennedy who might just be able to free them from the Vietnam debacle and reunite the country. But Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on 6 June. As a result, Johnson's vice president Hubert Humphrey got the nomination, but not before the Democratic convention in Chicago had turned into a riot with running battles between anti-war protesters and the police of Mayor Richard Daley, the last of the big-city bosses. Norman Mailer again immortalised the event in his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago – the Republican convention was held in Miami. It nominated former hawk Richard Nixon, who, after a political volte face, now promised peace with honour. After the Chicago convention, Rubin, Hoffman and five others – the 'Chicago Seven' – were tried on charges of conspiracy to incite violence and crossing state lines with intent to riot. After a long trial punctuated with taunts and outbursts from the defendants, they were acquitted of conspiracy, although five were convicted of incitement, and all of them, plus their lawyers, were cited for contempt a total of some 200 times. The convictions were later overturned.

  In the election in November, Nixon beat Humphrey in a close vote. America now found it had a right-wing Republican president who had run on a peace ticket. Th
is split the anti-war movement. But it soon became clear that, rather than ending the war, Nixon was expanding it and the peace lobby had to start up all over again. In September 1969 a former McCarthy campaign worker, Sam Brown, began the Vietnam Moratorium Committee with the intention of showing that anti-war protest was not confined to students. 15 October 1969 was declared National Moratorium Day and some 250,000 people from all walks of life took to the streets of Washington, DC to protest. Between 13 and 15 November another 500,000 demonstrated in response to the committee's call. By then the anti-war movement commanded popular support.

  The Moratorium demonstrations had a great effect on the Pentagon defence analyst Daniel Ellsberg, one of thirty-six who had produced a massive report on the conduct of the war which became known as the 'Pentagon Papers'. Although the publication of the Pentagon Papers did not take place until in the 1970s, the report was written in the 1960s and had an effect behind the scenes. In June 1967, at the behest of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Ellsberg and his colleagues began reviewing America's policy in Vietnam, beginning in 1954. The resulting report took eight months to compile. Officially called 'The History of the Decision Making Process on Vietnam,' it ran to 47 volumes, 7,100 pages in all, cataloguing systematic government deception, cynicism, and incompetence in the handling of the war. Only 15 copies were printed. There were rumours that McNamara planned to leak the report to his friend Robert Kennedy to help him in his bid for the Presidency.