New Political Science,

Volume 27, Number 1, March 2005

Movement Outcomes and Movement Decline: The

Vietnam War and the Antiwar Movement
Joel Lefkowitz
State University of New York at New Paltz
Abstract Conventional accounts underestimate the duration and impact of the
movement against the Vietnam War. Data from the New York Times Index show more
arrests in antiwar protests in 1972 than in the years usually considered the height of the
movement; demonstrations continued until a week before the end of the war. The
persistence of the movement strengthens claims it succeeded. While those who minimize
movement influence assume it had to be popular to succeed, it had a direct impact on policy
makers uncertain about future trends in public opinion and electoral behavior. The
movement changed the discourse about, and the conduct of, the war, restraining escalation
and accelerating troop withdrawals. Comparing Nixons goals and those of the movement
with the Paris Peace Accords shows the success of the movement. The movement also
helped lower the voting age, reform the presidential nominating system, and change
attitudes towards military action.

The movement against the Vietnam War continues to stir controversy, most
recently in the hullabaloo over John Kerrys participation in antiwar protests 33
years earlier. Despite the importance of the antiwar movement and the passions it
still provokes, there has been surprisingly little research on the movement by
political scientists and sociologists.1 In the work that has been done, conventional
expectations of what movements look like and how they exercise influence have
led to underestimation of the duration and impact of protest against the Vietnam
War. This article reconsiders conventional accounts of what happened to the
movement and because of the movement, that is, the movements decline and its
impact. Data presented here shed new light on the duration of the movement, and
a critical review of alternative accounts suggests a more reasonable narrative of
the dynamics of movement influence, which finds support in a comparison of the
goals of the movement and its opponents with the outcome of the conflict.
There has been little theoretical work on movement decline, and little
empirical evidence presented in discussions of the decline of the Vietnam antiwar
movement. Events data presented here show that, like reports of Mark Twains
death, accounts of the movements decline have been greatly exaggerated.2 Data
from the New York Times Index show more arrests in antiwar protests in 1972 than
1
Doug McAdam and Yang Su, The War at Home: Antiwar Protests and Congressional
Voting, 1965 to 1973, American Sociological Review 67 (2002), p. 697.
2
As early as the fall of 1966 Newsweek pronounced campus activism on the wane
(Newsweek, October 10, 1966, p. 72) and Time reported the dampening of protest
(Time, November 18, 1966, p. 95).

ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/05/010001-22 q 2005 Caucus for a New Political Science
DOI: 10.1080/07393140500030766

2 Joel Lefkowitz
in the years usually considered the height of the movement, and demonstrations
continued until a week before the end of the war. Finding that the movement
continued until the end of the war strengthens claims of movement success.
The movements impact can be traced in three ways. Through disruptive
protests the movement had a direct impact on policy makers who were uncertain
about future trends in public opinion and electoral behavior. The movement also
had an indirect impact through reverberations of protest inside the armed forces.
In addition, the movement changed the discourse about, and the conduct of, the
war, restraining escalation and accelerating troop withdrawals.
Comparing Richard Nixons goals and those of the antiwar movement with
the Peace Accords demonstrates the success of the movement. In addition, the
movement contributed to other changes, including the lowering of the voting age,
reform of the presidential nominating system, and development of the Vietnam
syndrome, which constrained some later decisions to use force, and continues to
shape the perceptions of many people.
Decline of the Antiwar Movement
Although there has been a noticeable absence of material on the decline of
insurgency in the movement literature, theories of movement emergence
suggest an implicit account of movement decline.3 Implicit resource
mobilization arguments have been common among writers somewhat sympathetic to the movement; nave rational choice arguments common among critics.
Neither approach is consistent with the duration of the movement.
Echoing the frequent emphasis on organization in explaining movement
emergence some writers saw organizational decay as the cause of the decline of
the antiwar movement. For Todd Gitlin, the movement ended when SDS ended,
because SDS ended: The crucial fact is that once SDS imploded, there was no
national organization to keep the student movement boiling, to channel antiwar
energy into common action, to keep local organizers in touch with one another, to
provide continuity from semester to semester.4
Kirkpatrick Sale made the same argument:
The collapse of SDS on the nations campuses had several important ramifications.
For one thing, the lack of a single strong student group . . . meant that any sustained
national actiona march or an antidraft campaignwould be much more difficult
to mount, and the tendency for each local group to pick and choose among the
various causes would be accelerated . . . There would be no national identity for the
press to focus on, nothing to give the chapters that . . . sense of being part of a single
nation-wide force, nothing that the incoming freshmen would know and anticipate,
even pick their college because of.5

Critics saw movement participation as an effort to avoid the dangers of the

war, and the end of the movement when chances of being sent to Vietnam ended.
According to Stephen Ambrose, Nixon judged, rightly if cynically, that the
heart of the antiwar movement was male college students threatened with the
3

Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 181, 63.
4
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987), p. 417.
5
Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 616 617.

Movement Outcomes and Decline 3

draft . . . not idealists but only frightened young men out to save their own skins . . .
no longer threatened by the draft . . . as Nixon hoped and expected, most of them
stopped marching for peace.6
A related argument, stressing repression, or the increasing costs rather than
the declining benefits of movement participation, was suggested by Melvin Small,
who emphasized the very firm hand displayed by the Justice Department in
quelling protest.7 According to Herbert Marcuse, The movement did not die, it
was murdered.8
These explanations of why the movement declined relied on a conventional
assertion about when the movement declined. By 1970, the SDS national office had
closed, troop withdrawals had begun, and the shootings at Kent State had shown
that the cost of being near an antiwar protest could be death.9 As a result,
explanations of movement decline in terms of organizational failure, declining
benefits, or increasing costs depend on locating movement decline in 1970.
In the conventional view, as Gitlin put it: Activism never recovered from the
summer vacation of 1970.10 However, the only published source Gitlin cited for
this assertion actually reported that the academic year (1970 71) was not as
tranquil as is generally believed,11 and a follow up study by the same authors
reported more antiwar demonstrations in the week following the April 1972
bombing than after the 1970 invasion of Cambodia.12
According to John Roche, the end of the draft and the withdrawal of
American ground troops obliterated the student antiwar mobilization. When
President Nixon mined Haiphong and resumed full-scale bombing there was
barely a whisper on the nations campuses.13 After the mining of Haiphong,
however, the New York Times reported antiwar protest convulsed cities and
college campuses across the country . . . as demonstrators blocked highways,
occupied buildings, andat nightfought against club-wielding policemen
under clouds of tear gas . . . Hundreds were arrested.14 In the four days following
the announcement of the mining, police arrested nearly 2,000 demonstrators in
antiwar protests, compared to 1,800 arrests in the protests following the invasion
of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State in the first two weeks of May 1970.15
6

Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962 1972, Vol. 2 (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 264 265. This nave rational choice argument fails to take
into account the free-rider problem.
7
Melvin Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
1988), p. 218.
8
Quoted in Gitlin, Sixties, p. 415.
9
Sale, SDS, p. 647; Jeffrey Kimball, Nixons Vietnam War (Lawrence, Kansas: University
Press of Kansas, 1998), pp. 149 150.
10
Gitlin, Sixties, p. 411.
11
Alan E. Bayer and Alexander W. Astin, Campus Unrest 1970 71: Was It Really That
Quiet? Educational Record (Fall 1971), pp. 301 313.
12
Alan E. Bayer and Alexander W. Astin, War Protest on U.S. Campuses During April
1972, Higher Education Panel Report, American Council on Education, May 9, 1972.
13
John P. Roche, The Impact of Dissent on Foreign Policy: Past and Future, in Anthony
Lake (ed.), The Vietnam Legacy: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign
Policy (New York: New York University Press, 1976), p. 130.
14
John Darnton, Hundreds Are Arrested in Antiwar Demonstrations, New York Times,
May 11, 1972.
15
Terrence Smith, Strong Misgivings Over the Solitary Decision, New York Times, May
14, 1972; Sale, SDS, p. 637.

4 Joel Lefkowitz
The conventional account is so deeply ingrained that Doug McAdam and Yang
Su reiterated the view that campus anti-war protest waned markedly following
the reopening of campuses in the fall of 1970 . . . [then] declined still further even
though their data clearly showed more antiwar protest events in the spring of 1972
than at any other point except the May 1970 demonstrations.16 Similarly, although
they asserted that [b]y the time the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January of
1973, the movement was largely moribund, their data showed the number of
antiwar protest events in January 1973 exceeded all but one month in 1968 and
1969.17
A similar triumph of the conventional construction of movement decline over
the data occurs in Kenneth Heinemans study of the antiwar movement at the
campus level. Heineman began the Epilogue of his study of the antiwar
movement firmly echoing the conventional perspective: In the months following
the 1970 strike, the campus Left collapsed.18 The evidence he provided supports
the opposite view: a few pages later he wrote that in 1972 the nations campuses
exploded.19 Heineman reported several 1972 demonstrations at Michigan State
University involving thousands of participants. One such demonstration
continued for days and led to a declaration of a state of emergency by the
governor.20 In addition, successful student voter registration drives had
resulted in a dovish majority on the city council.21 Largely as a result of this
latter development, Heineman, emphasizing the moderate, polite, and effective
character of the movement in East Lansing, considered the movement at Michigan
State to have expanded in the seventies.22 Heineman presented the case of
Michigan State as a stark contrast to Penn State, which he saw as a failure that he
blamed on what he termed the self-defeating radical student Left.23 But the
events Heineman chronicled burst that frame. At Penn State, in a week of
demonstrations following the mining of Haiphong, 5,500 protesters blocking city
streets won the temporary shut down of the Ordnance Research Laboratory, a
university-military research facility that had been the target of protests since
1965.24 Heineman reported higher turnout at only one earlier demonstration at
Penn State: in April 1970 6,000 people peacefully rallied on the Old Main lawn,25
more polite, but not as effective, perhaps not even larger, given a reasonable
margin of error in measuring the number of demonstrators.
Measuring the Antiwar Protest Movement
Movement activity is often reduced to activities of organizations or mass
demonstrations. The repertoire of the antiwar movement included mass
demonstrations and direct action to disrupt the draft and war-related activity,
16

McAdam and Su, War at Home, pp. 699, 711.

Ibid.
18
Kenneth J. Heineman, Campus Wars: The Peace Movement at American State Universities
in the Vietnam Era (New York: New York University Press, 1993), p. 257.
19
Ibid., p. 263.
20
Ibid., p. 264.
21
Ibid., p. 263.
22
Ibid., pp. 263, 259.
23
Ibid., p. 259.
24
Ibid., pp. 265, 151.
25
Ibid., p. 244.
17

Movement Outcomes and Decline 5

as well as the invention of the teach-in. Turnout at antiwar demonstrations
fluctuated: no demonstration in 1968 was as large as an April 1967 demonstration
in New York, but that did not indicate decline of the movement since the following
year saw the largest demonstration yet in November 1969. Although there were
large demonstrations in 1970, none were as large as the November 1969
moratorium, although an April 1971 demonstration rival[ed] the record-setting
November 1969 mobilization in sizewith estimates for turnout ranging from
250,000 to 500,000.26 Demonstrations in 1972 were smaller; the largest protest drew
35,000, perhaps more than 50,000 demonstrators in the rain in New York, April 22;
fewer at a demonstration in the rain in Washington in May.27 More important than
the weather, changing ideas about movement tactics contributed to lower turnout
at demonstrations, without indicating an end to the movement. Timothy Crouse
reported many young activists considered the National Peace Action Committee
(NPAC), one of the major organizers, pretty narrow and stupid sometimes.
Everyone is supposed to use only one slogan, the NPAC-approved slogan: Out
Now! And they have only one tacticthe mass march. But going to Washington is
increasingly not the thing to do.28 Moderate leaders came to the same conclusion:
it would be better If you worked in your own community than to go to a
demonstration in Washington.29 Tom Wells recounted a similar turn among the
radical antiwar leadership toward decentralized civil disobedience instead of
large national demonstrations.30 In that context, assessing the extent of movement
activity by the size of national demonstrations is inadequate.
Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward identified collective defiance as the
key and distinguishing feature of a protest movement.31 Arrests are a flawed but
potentially useful indicator of the extent of collective defiance. Table 1 details 6,224
arrests in antiwar demonstrations in 1972 enumerated in the New York Times Index,
more than half of which resulted from protests against the bombing of Hanoi and
mining of Haiphong in six weeks in the spring of 1972. In contrast, Ted Robert
Gurr counted 4,050 arrests in antiwar demonstrations in the Times Index between
July 1968 and December 1970.32 This strongly supports the contention that
movement remained active in 1972.
Arrests measure collective defiance of rules and norms only indirectly,
measuring directly only the severity of the police response, thereby presenting a
possible challenge to the validity of this measure.33 Measuring arrests without
26
Tom Wells, The War Within: Americas Battle Over Vietnam (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), pp. 133, 263, 392, 405, 411, 497; William Berkowitz, The Impact of
Anti-Vietnam Demonstrations upon National Public Opinion and Military Indicators,
Social Science Research 2 (1973), p. 4.
27
Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? American Protest Against the War
in Vietnam, 1963 1975 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984), p. 383; Wells, War Within, p. 539.
28
Timothy Crouse, Slow Burn in the Powder Keg, Rolling Stone, June 8, 1972, p. 26.
29
Jerome Grossman, quoted in Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 272.
30
Wells, War Within, p. 399.
31
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor Peoples Movements: Why They
Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 5.
32
Ted Robert Gurr, Political Protest and Rebellion in the 1960s: The United States in
World Perspective, in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr (eds), Violence in America:
Historical and Comparative Perspectives, revised (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), pp. 55 56.
33
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Normalizing Collective Protest, in
Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (eds), The Breaking of the American Social Compact
(New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 351 352.

February 13
March 30
April 10
April 16
April 18
April 18
April 18
April 18
April 18
April 18
April 19
April 21
April 22
April 22
April 22
April 22
April 22
April 22
April 22
April 24
April 25
April 25
April 25
April 26
April 27
April 27
April 27

Date

Manchester, NH
Harrisburg, PA
Poughkeepsie, NY
Washington, DC
Madison, WI
Detroit, MI
Detroit, MI
San Francisco, CA
San Francisco, CA
Stratford, CT
College Park, MD
Dayton, OH
Syracuse, NY
Chicopee, MA
College Park, MD
Boise, ID
Detroit, MI
Stanford, CA
New York, NY
Earle, NJ
New York, NY
Chicopee, MA
Maine
New York, NY
Lexington, MA
Kent, OH
Groton, CT

Place
91
15
25
19
20
20
20
20
20
21
17
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
16
18
18
18
1
20
20
20

Page
3
1
6
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2
4
5
5
5
5
5
5
5
2
3
3
3
4
6
6
8

Column
10
166
9
200
4
4
23
5
41
60
10
160
27
0
5
15
15
100
18
21
3
0
10
7
75
200
42

Number arrested

Target
Nixon campaign
Federal Building
IBM
White House
U Wisconsin
U Michigan Detroit campus
Sen. Griffin office
USAF recruiting center
Alameda Naval Air Station
Sikorsky
U Maryland ROTC
Wright Patterson Air Force Base
Air Force recruiting office
Westover Air Force Base (95)
College Park, MD
Boise State College
Federal Building
Stanford University
Veterans Administration
Earle Naval Ammo Depot
Columbia U
Westover Air Force Base (38)
Colby College ROTC
Columbia U
Raytheon Co.
Kent State ROTC
Submarine base

Table 1. Arrests in antiwar activities enumerated in the New York Times Index, 1972

6 Joel Lefkowitz

April 28
April 29
May 1
May 1
May 5
May 5
May 5
May 5
May 9
May 10
May 10
May 11
May 11
May 11
May 11
May 12
May 12
May 12
May 14
May 14
May 16
May 16
May 17
May 19
May 19

Date

Table 1 Continued

Boston, MA
New York, NY
New York, NY
Massachusetts
New York, NY
Chicopee, MA
New Haven, CT
College Park, MD
New York, NY
Davis, CA
New York, NY
New York, NY
Burlington, VT
Princeton, NJ
Albuquerque, NM
New Brunswick, NJ
Princeton, NJ
Washington, DC
New York, NY
Biscayne, FL
Portsmouth, NH
Princeton, NJ
Washington, DC
Chicopee, MA
Rantoul, IL

Place
17
1
1
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
22
1
17
17
17
21
21
21
31
32
13
13
20
20
13

Page

8
3
7
3
5
5
5
8
2
5
4
1
1
1
1
2
1
2
1
1
3
1
3

Column
44
3
8
0
28
0
17
37
10
57
18
10
52
58
36
18
71
28
50
2
20
39
120
0
35

Number arrested
WBZ-TV
Columbia U
St. Patricks Cathedral
Westover Air Force Base (25)
Honeywell
Westover Air Force Base (60)
New Haven, CT
Highway transportation
Columbia U
Rail transportation
Columbia U
ITT
Burlington, VT
Princeton
Kirtland Air Force Base
Rail transportation
Princeton IDA
Capitol
Columbia U
Nixon
Pease Air Force Base
Princeton IDA
Capitol
Westover Air Force Base (95)
Chanute Air Force Base

Target

Movement Outcomes and Decline 7

Chicopee, MA
Washington, DC
Washington, DC
Washington, DC
Earle, NJ
Ann Arbor, MI
Washington, DC
Miami, FL
Miami, FL
Miami, FL
Miami, FL
Vancouver, WA
Boston, MA
Washington, DC
Madison, WI
York, PA
New York, NY
Total

Place
13
13
13
20
32
79
11
36
1
1
38
21
26
35
94
11
60

Page
1
1
1
3
1
5
1
1
7
7
1
1
8
3
4
1
5

Column
1200
200
220
100
52
30
111
7
212
900
1146
6
7
12
4
5
21
6224

Number arrested
Westover Air Force Base
Capitol
Pentagon
Capitol
Earle Naval Ammo Depot
U Michigan
Capitol
Republican Convention
Republican Convention
Republican Convention
Republican Convention
Rail transportation
Nixon campaign
Nixon campaign
U Wisconsin
Rail transportation
US Mission to UN

Target

Note: Early reports of arrests at Westover Air Force Base are reported in parentheses to avoid double counting, since the index also reported a total
number on May 19.

May 19
May 22
May 23
May 25
June 12
June 18
June 28
August 22
August 23
August 24
August 25
October 29
November 1
November 2
November 9
December 19
December 22

Date

Table 1 Continued

8 Joel Lefkowitz

Movement Outcomes and Decline 9

attention to context can mislead. In 1971, planned civil disobedience to stop the
government resulted in more than seven thousand [arrests]the most for any
single event or on any single day in U.S. history.34 Police overreaction inflated the
number of arrests. A report by the District of Columbia Human Relations
Commission found that more than half of the 10,000 young people arrested
during the Mayday demonstrations . . . did not violate any law . . . the principal
criterion by which arrests had been made appeared to be evidence of
youthfulness such as long hair . . . rather than evidence of an unlawful act.35
Wells reported that A subsequent class action suit by the ACLU won $12 million
in damages for wrongfully arrested persons.36 Under such circumstances, arrest
totals are not a valid measure of movement activity. While in May 1971 the arrest
of [s]cores of innocent bystanders in Washington inflated arrest totals,37 in 1972,
by contrast, police tactics often aimed to avoid arrests.38 In 1972 there were
two kinds of arrests, and notable lack of arrests at other events. Police made many
arrests at nonviolent sit-ins that sought to block access to war-related facilities
such as air force bases and military contractors, where there would be few
bystanders. In addition, police arrested relatively small numbers of roving bands
of protesters involved in street disorders175 in a crowd of 5,000 in
Gainesville, 30 in a crowd of 2,000 in Minneapolis.39 No arrests were recorded in
the Times Index in other incidents where they might have been expected, such as
hundreds of antiwar students smashing windows, and destroying offices,
overturning desks, throwing typewriters out of windows . . . and setting a fire.40
In short, while the number of arrests was inflated in 1971, the number of arrests in
1972 minimizes rather than exaggerates the extent of disruptive antiwar protest.
While the use of the Times Index allows for replication, the Index does not
consistently record relevant events. While agreeing with critics that the Index is not
appropriate in some areas, McAdam defended its use to crudely measure
hard news such as numbers of participants in events.41 McAdam pointed out
that 83 percent of all dated events between 1955 and 1962 . . . mentioned in nine
descriptive accounts of the [civil rights] movement . . . were reported in the Times
. . . [but] the descriptive accounts report only 9 percent . . . of all events contained in
the Index.42 However, Gitlin reported only 10 percent of all severe protests
received national press coverage in 1970 71, compared with 40 percent in
1968 69.43 McAdams point suggests the Index is a comprehensive guide to the
early years of the movement; Gitlins suggests that in later years of a movement
coverage is less comprehensive (perhaps because continued movement activity
might seem less newsworthy over time). In addition, protests in the early 1970s
were more likely to occur at smaller and less visible institutions.44 Despite these
34

Wells, War Within, pp. 471, 503.

Rights Report is Critical of Wide Mayday Arrests, New York Times, July 5, 1971.
36
Wells, War Within, p. 503.
37
Ibid.
38
John Kifner, Protesters and Police Calmly Approach a Showdown, New York Times,
August 18, 1972.
39
Darnton, Hundreds Arrested..
40
Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 381.
41
McAdam, Political Process, p. 235.
42
Ibid., pp. 236 237.
43
Gitlin, Sixties, p. 411.
44
Bayer and Astin, Campus Unrest; Bayer and Astin, War Protest..
35

10 Joel Lefkowitz
various reasons to find a declining number of arrests, Table 1 shows significant
antiwar protest in 1972.
Even the widespread protests reported in Table 1 underestimate the extent of
movement activity in 1972. While the Times Index enumerated 348 arrests in antiwar
protests in four days following the mining of Haiphong, for example, Table 2 details
the additional 1,083 arrests enumerated in the full text of the Times in those four
days. In a Week in Review summary on May 14, 1972, the Times reported, Once
again the President appeared on nationwide television to announce a major
escalation of the Vietnam War, and once again his words triggered the predictable
sequence of events that have become a fixture of American life . . . By late Friday,
nearly 2,000 demonstrators . . . were reported arrested around the country.45 (ABCTV reported 2,400 arrests, NBC 2,000 arrests, and CBS 1,800 arrests that week.46)
In short, for these four days in May, the Times Index recorded less than 20% of
the total noted in the Week in Review summary; news coverage in the full text of
the Times reported about 70% of that total. The arrests reported in Table 1 include
only those enumerated in the Index, not the other arrests, such as those in Table 2,
reported in the Times.
The final escalation of the war, Linebacker II to the Nixon administration,
the Christmas bombing to critics, sparked the final demonstration against the
war. With targets in North Vietnam selected for maximum psychological shock
in 11 days of bombing Bach Mai hospital was destroyed, eight foreign embassies
were damaged; and 2,196 civilians were killed and 1,577 wounded.47 The 1973
counterinaugural demonstration, condemning Nixon for the Christmas bombing,
drew more than 60,000 participants,48 perhaps 80,000,49 or 100,000.50 Whichever
number one prefers, that protest dwarfed the 1969 counterinaugural of fewer
than ten thousand,51 and demonstrated continuing active, mass opposition to the
war. The Paris Peace Accords were signed a week later.
That the antiwar movement continued until the end of the war underlines the
importance of success in explaining movement decline, and also suggests, if
movement decline mirrors movement emergence, the importance of grievances in
explaining movement emergence.52 And the persistence of the movement to the
end of the war provides stronger, although not sufficient, support for the impact of
the movement.
Anthony Oberschall argued the 1960s movements turned out surprisingly
successful, in large part because institutional elites and organizations pressured
and challenged by them took up the burden of implementing some of their goals
just as the movements were disintegrating.53 Similarly, Small concluded, A final
45

Smith, Strong Misgivings, p. 1.

Television News Index and Abstracts, 1972, pp. 752, 758, 763.
47
Kimball, Nixons War, p. 469, n. 111, p. 365.
48
Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 402.
49
Wells, War Within, p. 563.
50
Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, p. 223.
51
Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 210.
52
In contrast, resource mobilization theorists have argued that grievances are
secondary. J. Craig Jenkins, Resource Mobilization Theory and the Study of Social
Movements, Annual Review of Sociology 9 (1983), p. 530.
53
Anthony Oberschall, The Decline of the 1960s Social Movements, in Louis
Kreisberg (ed.), Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change (Greenwich: JAI Press,
1978), pp. 283 284.
46

Movement Outcomes and Decline 11

Table 2. Arrests after the mining of Haiphong reported in Times articles but not enumerated
in the Times Index
Date
May 10

May 11

May 12

May 13
Total

Number arrested

Location

50
51
70
50
31
9
8
30
32
13
80
50
52
174
200
58
60
47
18
1083

Gainesville
Binghamton
Boulder, CO
New Haven
Westport, CT
Chicago
Stanford
U Minnesota
Berkeley
Evanston/Chicago
Athens, Ohio ROTC
Madison
UCLA
Gainesville
Boston
Princeton
San Francisco
Princeton
Binghamton

ironic factor in the movements decline has to do with its success . . . Congress,
responding in part to the many years of pressure from the movement, was
keeping tight reins on the president . . . The success of the movement made it
increasingly unnecessary in 1971.54 As Charles Tilly urged, explanations of
outcomes should concern not effects alone but also the very dynamics of social
movement interactions.55 Both Oberschall and Small saw the movement as
having succeeded after it declined, but they did not explain how movements exert
pressure after disintegrating. That the movement persisted to the end of the war
makes more sense, but does not explain how the movement exerted pressure.
Movement Impact
David Meyer noted that demonstrating the influence of movements on foreign
policy is a particularly difficult theoretical problem because factors
exogenous to domestic politics and protest, especially the conduct of other
nations, substantially influence the policy environment.56 Three influence
pathways through which movements affect foreign policy were distinguished by
Jeffrey Knopf in a study of the impact of the peace movement on arms control
policy: mobilization of public opinion that created electoral incentives for action
54

Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, pp. 220 221.

Charles Tilly, From Interactions to Outcomes in Social Movements, in Marco
Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly (eds), How Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 270.
56
David S. Meyer, How the Cold War Was Really Won: The Effects of the Antinuclear
Movements of the 1980s, in Marco Giugni, Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly (eds), How
Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 184, 187.
55

12 Joel Lefkowitz
. . . resources that changed the balance among competing coalitions in Congress . . .
ideas that altered the course of bureaucratic debates.57 Examinations of the
impact of the antiwar movement have often focused on congressional
action, election results, and public opinion, but a critical review of these studies
finds them problematic. The antiwar movement had a direct impact on the
decisions made by Johnson and Nixon, as well as an indirect impact by
encouraging disruption inside the armed forces and changing the discourse about
the war.
In a recent study of the movement, McAdam and Su explored its influence on
congressional action and found only minimal policy responsiveness to the
antiwar movement, which they attribute to a lack of general public support and
sympathy.58 However, the measures of policy responsivenessthe pace and
intensity of peace votesare problematic. Congressional maneuvering not
considered in their model caused variance in the number of votes, their measure
of the pace of action. For example, Congressional Quarterly reported on
amendments and procedural motions designed to delay and confuse the
proceedings.59 It took eight separate roll-call votes on August 2, 1972 for the
Senate to decide on a cutoff of funds for support of U.S. air, naval and ground
troops in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia within four months of enactment of the
bill, pending the release of U.S. prisoners of war.60 For example, in the sixth vote
in the series the Senate agreed to a motion by Majority Leader Mike Mansfield
(D-Montana) to table a motion by Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-Pennsylvania)
to reconsider the vote by which an earlier motion to table the antiwar amendment
had been defeated.61 The number of roll-call votes in August 1972 was neither an
indication of the extent of antiwar sentiment in the Congress at that time nor
related to the demonstrations at the Republican convention later that month. Nor
was the lack of votes in Congress in August 1968 related to the famous
demonstrations at the Democratic convention that month, since Congress was in
recess. In addition, differences in the content of peace proposals undermine the
procedure of calculating the average percentage of pro-peace votes. For example,
June 1971 Senate roll-call votes on the draft included proposals to end the draft,
defeated 23 67; extend the draft for one year instead of two, defeated 43 49;
facilitate voter registration for those registering for the draft, passed 47 31; and
exempt from the draft men with brothers killed in action or held as prisoners of
war, passed 59 9.62 That month saw a higher proportion of pro-peace votes than
the previous month, in which Senators cast votes on efforts to prohibit the
deployment of draftees in combat in Southeast Asia, defeated 21 52, and in
combat anywhere outside the United States, defeated 7 61.63 The difference in the
substance of the proposals, rather than the changing influence of the movement,
explains the variance in the proportion of pro-peace votes. Thus the extent of
movement impact on congress is uncertain.
57

Jeffrey W. Knopf, Domestic Society and International Cooperation: The Impact of Protest on
US Arms Control Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3.
58
McAdam and Su, War at Home, p. 718.
59
Congressional Quarterly Almanac 1972, p. 416.
60
Ibid., pp. 49-S, 50-S.
61
Ibid.
62
Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1971, pp. 13-S, 14-S.
63
Ibid, p. 12-S.

Movement Outcomes and Decline 13

John Mueller thought the movement somewhat counterproductive because
it may have contributed to Nixon defeating Hubert Humphrey in the 1968
presidential election.64 However, the war might not have ended sooner had
Humphrey been elected. While acknowledging that Humphreys rhetoric in 1968
did not differ from Nixons, Mueller claimed that Humphrey favored
conciliation and eventually dominated the antiwar movement.65 But, in the
midst of the 1970 midterm campaign, Humphrey supported Nixons position on
the war, just as he had supported Johnsons.66 And Humphrey continued to
support the war in the 1972 presidential primaries, supporting the April 1972
bombing of North Vietnam.67 Hunter Thompson expressed the antiwar
movements view of Humphrey:
He will call a press conference to announce that if elected he will have our boys out
of Vietnam within ninety daysthen rush across town, weeping and jabbering the
whole way, to appear on a network TV show and make a fist-shaking, emotional
appeal for every American to stand behind the President and applaud his recent
decision to resume heavy bombing in North Vietnam.68

Not just Humphreys preferences, nor his intention to have Henry Kissinger as his
National Security Adviser,69 but the weight of the party system might have
blocked a settlement had Humphrey been elected. As Nixon understood, drawing
an analogy to the way Eisenhower dealt with the Korean War, he would be able
to agree to peace terms that [Johnson, or for that matter, Humphrey] could not
accept . . . without opening himself to Republican charges that he . . . had sold
cheap the sacrifice of American lives.70
Rather than movements exercising electoral influence through the victory of
candidates identified with movement goals, Knopf emphasized movement
impact on calculations about future elections: The White House might be driven
by concerns that the opposition party will pick up the votes of those dissatisfied
with existing . . . policy in either the next congressional or presidential election, or
that the presidents approval rating will go down, lessening his legislative
influence.71 In addition, Knopf pointed out that for a movement to have an
impact through public opinion and electoral calculations, instead of majority
support it is sufficient that the movements concern might be an important
enough issue to some segments of the public to make a difference in electoral
outcomes.72 The timing of the major peace initiatives in 1968 and 1972 strongly
suggests a concern with the next election. On November 1, 1968, days before the
64

John Mueller, Reflections on the Vietnam Antiwar Movement and on the Curious
Calm at the Wars End, in Peter Braestrup (ed.), Vietnam as History: Ten Years After the Paris
Peace Accords (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 151 153.
65
Ibid., pp. 153 154.
66
Small, Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves, p. 212.
67
3 Democrats Back U.S. Right to Renew Raids in the North, New York Times, April 5,
1972.
68
Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail (New York: Popular
Library, 1973), p. 158.
69
Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York:
Summit, 1983), p. 14.
70
Ambrose, Nixon, p. 198.
71
Knopf, Domestic Society, pp. 58 59.
72
Ibid.

14 Joel Lefkowitz
presidential election, Lyndon Johnson ordered a bombing halt in an effort to
advance peace talks and help Humphreys presidential campaign.73 That is,
Johnson tried to help Humphrey win back movement sympathizers defecting
from the Democratic ticket because of the war. Nixon made that effort moot,
sabotaging the peace talks to improve his electoral prospects.74 Discussing the
October 1972 announcement that peace was at hand, Kimball observed
Nixons negotiating strategy during the previous two years had been highly
conditioned by electoral concerns.75 Nixon planned to pull the rug out from
under any Democrat who tried to make the war the issue in 1972 by pulling
troops out.76
Emphasizing hostility toward the movement, the negative follower effect,
Adam Garfinkle argued, the antiwar movement did not help stop the war but
rather helped prolong it.77 Similarly, Mueller speculated that hostility to the
movement would tend to frighten away more respectable would-be war
opponents from joining the cause.78 But Mueller himself refuted this claim,
reporting, the antiwar movement became considerably broader after Nixons
election. In particular, many liberal Democrats who had supported the war out of
loyalty to the Johnson administration were released by the election.79 Gitlin
described how students were joined by respectables lobbying against the war in
1970: a thousand lawyers, thirty-three university heads, architects, doctors,
nurses, a hundred corporate executives. Two hundred fifty State Department
employees, including fifty Foreign Service officers, signed a statement against
administration policy.80 Nevertheless, Gitlin claimed as one of the stunning
political facts of the decade: that as the war steadily lost popularity in the late
Sixties, so did the antiwar movement.81 But the only evidence he offered was a
single Gallup Poll after the 1968 Democratic Convention reporting 56 percent
approving of the police, 31 percent disapproving.82
For the antiwar movement to have lost popularity, it must have been more
popular earlier, but neither historical accounts nor survey data show that. Terry
Anderson recounted the intensity of hostility toward the movement in 1965:
In Cleveland, a large crowd attacked antiwar marchers, and fighting erupted as
they burned peace banners . . . in Ann Arbor 200 counterdemonstrators ripped apart
an antiwar float . . . War supporters in Washington, D.C. held signs: Burn the Teachin Professors, More Police Brutality . . . Prowar New Yorkers tossed eggs,
tomatoes, and red paint at demonstrators . . . hundreds of war supporters chanted
Give us joy, bomb Hanoi.83
73

Ambrose, Nixon, p. 207.

Kimball, Nixons War, pp. 56 61; Berman, No Peace, pp. 32 36; Ambrose, Nixon,
pp. 207 217.
75
Kimball, Nixons War, p. 346.
76
New York Times, April 12, 1972; New York Times, October 3, 1971.
77
Adam Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar
Movement (New York: St. Martins Press 1995), pp. 10, 1.
78
Mueller, Reflections, p. 152.
79
Ibid., pp. 153 154.
80
Gitlin, Sixties, p. 410.
81
Ibid., p. 262.
82
Ibid., p. 471.
83
Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from Greensboro to
Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 144.
74

Movement Outcomes and Decline 15

In a 1965 CBS News poll, only 24% credited protesters with honest disagreement
with U.S. policy, while a majority saw them as Carrying out Communist plans
or Mostly draft dodgers.84 70% in a December 1967 Louis Harris poll saw
demonstrations as acts of disloyalty.85
The hostility to the antiwar movement that so shocked Gitlin, and seemed to
Garfinkle such decisive evidence that the movement failed, should be understood
in the context suggested by Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro: Americans have
a long history of distaste for demonstrators and protestors, even peaceful ones.86
Consider attitudes toward the civil rights movement. After the Supreme Court
ruled against segregation in interstate travel in Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and in
terminal facilities in Boynton v. Virginia (1960), the Freedom Riders, an interracial
group, including Jim Peck and John Lewis, rode on busses and sometimes tried to
use bus terminal facilities. For engaging in this legal activity, the Freedom Riders
suffered attacks by racist mobsin Birmingham, Alabama, Peck was seriously
injured requiring 50 stitches to close the gashes in his head, and in Montgomery,
Lewis was beaten and left the terminal bleeding profusely from the head.87
Although two-thirds of Gallup respondents agreed with the Supreme Court
decision that banned racial segregation in interstate travel and terminal facilities,
64% of respondents familiar with the issue disapproved of what the freedom
riders are doing, while only 24% approved.88 Such disapproval does not indicate
that the movement failed.
Further, not all the poll data about the antiwar movement were negative.
A 1969 Harris poll found that 81 percent had nonetheless concluded that the
demonstrators are raising real questions that ought to be discussed and
answered, a sharp contrast to the 24% in 1965 who thought protesters engaged
in honest disagreement. Further, Harris found that by a margin of 50 to 37
percent [poll respondents] also agreed with the demonstrators that the war was
morally indefensible.89 Not only did polls show agreement with movement
views, at the end of 1969 Harris also found respondents evenly divided in attitudes
toward the movement itself: 46% sympathized with the demonstrators,
while 45% did not.90
Still, some critics dismissed the movement as irrelevant because they failed to
find a relationship between the timing of demonstrations and changes in public
opinion. Reporting that When President Nixon announced the mining of North
Vietnamese ports and the interdiction of North Vietnamese supply lines in May,
1972, 59% of the public approved; 24% were opposed, William Berkowitz wrote,
[t]his figure is more than reminiscent of opinions recorded . . . [i]n the June 1965
. . . Gallup Political Index [when] . . . 59% opted for continuing the bombing.91
84

Role in Vietnam is Backed by Poll, New York Times, December 15, 1965.
Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 147.
86
Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in
American Policy Preferences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 350.
87
Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 34 35.
88
George Horace Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935 1971, Vol. 3, 1959 1971
(New York: Random House, 1972), p. 1723.
89
William M. Hammond, Public Affairs: The Military and the Media, 1968 1973.
(Washington, DC: US Army Center of Military History, 1996), p. 159.
90
Ibid., p. 169.
91
Berkowitz, Impact, p. 13.
85

16 Joel Lefkowitz
Instead of a misleading comparison of support for bombing in 1965 with support
for mining in 1972, support for bombing in both years should be compared.92
Gallup found 47% approved the bombing in April 1972, while 44% disapproved,
almost an even split, instead of a better than 2 1 pro-war majority that Berkowitz
presented.93 Although Berkowitz suggested attitudes toward the war remained
stable over seven years, in a finding he chose not to discuss, Berkowitz recorded
that the percentage of the population seeing the war as a mistake rose from under
25% in 1965 to 60% in 1972.94 Further, this approach misconceived movement
strategy. E. M. Schreiber wrote, If demonstrations were credited with bringing
about [troop withdrawals], presumably one would argue that demonstrations had
converted public opinion which in turn (presumably) encouraged the
administration to change its Vietnam policies.95 Such presumptions were neither
warranted nor necessary.
Antiwar activists articulated a different view, emphasizing the direct impact of
disruption and mobilization on policy makers. Most prominently, Tom Hayden
argued:
you have to make a cold calculation . . . to raise the internal cost to such a high level
that those decision-makers who only deal in cost-effectiveness terms will have to
get out of Vietnam . . . The cost in terms of internal disruption, generational conflict,
choking off the number of reliable soldiers, the number of willing taxpayersjust
make a list of everything they need to fight the war, and calculate what you can take
away from them.96

Similarly, Frank Bardacke suggested, if we can actually convince them that we

can cause chaos in this country as long as the war continues, so much the better.
We may have even stumbled on a strategy that could end the war.97 And Bill
Ayers: We felt . . . if we cant stop the war by convincing the majority of people,
we can certainly make the price greater.98 As Piven and Cloward pointed out,
usually disruptive tactics force concessions not by enlarging and consolidating
coalitions but by exacerbating electoral dissensus during periods when electoral
divisions are already widening,99 as Johnsons bombing halt indicated.
92
Because What may seem to be very slight shifts in wording . . . can alter . . .
responses, Page and Shapiro emphasize that The only safe way to identify opinion
change . . . is to compare answers to identical survey questions. Page and Shapiro, Rational
Public, p. 39.
93
George Horace Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1972 1977, Vol. 1, 1972 1975
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1978), p. 30. The 1965 and 1972 bombing questions
are not identical.
94
Berkowitz, Impact, p. 6.
95
E. M. Schreiber, Anti-War Demonstrations and American Public Opinion on the War
in Vietnam, British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976), p. 226. Similarly, McAdam and Su assert
antiwar activists were motivated by an implicit understanding of, and faith in
conventional democratic theory. Educate the public about the evils of the war and
mobilize and demonstrate the growing opposition, and eventually policymakers would be
persuaded to modify their actions and bring the conflict to a close. Or so antiwar activists
believed. McAdam and Su, War at Home, pp. 717 718.
96
Recollection quoted in Gitlin, Sixties, p. 289.
97
Ibid., p. 254.
98
Quoted in Wells, War Within, p. 369.
99
Piven and Cloward, Normalizing, p. 368.

Movement Outcomes and Decline 17

The movements disruptive strategy had a direct impact on decision-makers in
the executive branch, rather than one mediated by congressional victories,
winning over a majority of the public, or wining elections. The movement also
changed the discourse about the war.
Antiwar protests directly influenced decision-makers in both the Johnson and
Nixon administrations. As Cyrus Vance explained Johnsons advisers evaluation
of the situation in March 1968: We were weighing not only what was happening
in Vietnam, but the social and political effects in the United States, the impact on
the U.S. economy, the attitude of other nations. The divisiveness in the country
was growing with such acuteness that it was threatening to tear the United States
apart.100 While Garfinkle claimed that divisions probably meant divisions in
establishment opinion . . . not the dissent represented by radicals in the streets,101
Wellss interviews were clear: [Johnsons press secretary] George Christian said
the divisiveness Johnson felt the most when he gave his March 31 [1968] speech
[announcing a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam] was the campus unrest and
the demonstrations.102 Similarly, Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff during the Nixon administration, recalled that The reaction of the
noisy radical groups was considered all the time. And it served to inhibit and
restrain the decision makers and thus had a major impact.103
The impact of the antiwar movement on policy is clearly revealed by Nixons
abandonment of his November 1 ultimatum, his secret plan to end the war. Nixon
had explained his plan to his chief of staff, H. R. (Bob) Haldeman:
I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe Ive
reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. Well just slip the
word to them that, for Gods sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed about communism.
We cant restrain him when hes angryand he has his hand on the nuclear
buttonand Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.104

Nixon recalled that he set November 1, 1969the first anniversary of Johnsons

bombing haltas the deadline for what would in effect be an ultimatum to North
Vietnam . . . unless some serious breakthrough had been achieved by the
November 1 deadline, I would regretfully find myself obliged to have recourse
to measures of great consequence and force.105 Planning for these measures,
referred to as Operation Duck Hook, may have included consideration of nuclear
weapons.106 In any case, the plan was, in Kissingers words, for a savage,
decisive blow.107 After Nixon had made his threat, the targets had been planned,
100
Quoted in Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention: An Inside Account of How the
Johnson Policy of Escalation in Vietnam was Reversed, updated edition (New York: Longman,
1973), pp. 215 216.
101
Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts, p. 266.
102
Wells, War Within, p. 254.
103
Quoted in Wells, War Within, p. 579.
104
H. R. Haldeman with Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books,
1978), p. 83.
105
Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grasset and Dunlap,
1978), pp. 393 394.
106
Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 120 133; Berman, No Peace, pp. 54 57; Kimball, Nixons
War, pp. 158165.
107
Hersh, Price of Power, p. 118; Kimball, Nixons War, p. 163.

18 Joel Lefkowitz
and antiwar demonstrators mobilized, Nixon had to decide what to do about the
ultimatum. In his memoirs, Nixon recalled:
I knew that unless I had some indisputably good reason for not carrying out my
threat of using increased force when the ultimatum expired on November 1, the
Communists would become contemptuous of us and even more difficult to deal
with. I knew, however, that after all the protests and the Moratorium, American
public opinion would be seriously divided by any military escalation of the war.108

This concession by Nixon provided crucial evidence of the movements impact.109

As Wells put it, the movement exerted a critical influence on Nixons decision to
forgo Operation Duck Hook, thereby helping prevent bloodshed and human
misery in Vietnam on an unspeakable scale.110 Nevertheless, Garfinkle dismissed
as flat wrong this idea of movement success.111 Garfinkle claimed:
In fact, the supposition that the antiwar demonstrations of 1969 prevented the
Nixon administration politically from escalating the war makes little sense in light
of two facts: first, the administration was far more popular than the antiwar
movement and could have done whatever it wished on the battlefield, provided it
was willing to pay the price in the court of broad public opinion; and second, the
administration did escalate the war a few short months thereafterby invading
Cambodia.112

Both statements Garfinkle termed facts mislead. First, as Nixon explicitly

acknowledged, the administration was unwilling to pay the public opinion price.
Second, not only did Nixon specifically admit that delay would weaken his
position, the escalation that Garfinkle cited was itself cut short by protest.
According to Kissinger, The enormous uproar at home was profoundly
unnerving . . . The panicky decision to set a June 30 deadline for the removal of our
forces from Cambodia was one concrete result of public pressures.113
In addition to the direct impact of antiwar protest, reverberations of antiwar
disruptions114 shook the institution most essential to continuing the warthe
militaryboth indirectly through the media115 as well as through GI coffeehouses, new institutions created by the movement for that purpose.116 While
opposition to the war among veterans is belatedly receiving serious recognition,
108

Nixon, RN, p. 402.

Berman, No Peace, p. 57; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 379; Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 129 130;
Wells, War Within, p. 377.
110
Wells, War Within, p. 397.
111
Garfinkle, Telltale Hearts, p. 9.
112
Ibid., pp. 185 186.
113
Quoted in Wells, War Within, p. 435.
114
The most useful way to think about the effectiveness of protest is to examine the
disruptive effects on institutions of different forms of mass defiance, and then to examine
the political reverberations of those disruptions. Piven and Cloward, Poor Peoples
Movements, p. 24.
115
No one had to suggest it, a Presidio Mutiny participant explained, That is the
classical way you have a demonstration. We had all seen it on television. Steve Rees, A
Questioning Spirit: GIs Against the War, in Dick Cluster (ed.), They Should Have Served that
Cup of Coffee (Boston: South End Press, 1979), p. 149.
116
David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Garden City: Anchor
Press/Doubleday, 1975), pp. 53, 58.
109

Movement Outcomes and Decline 19

opposition to the war among active duty military personnel deserves more
attention. Colonel Robert Heinl warned that Seditioncoupled with disaffection
within the ranks, and externally fomented with an audacity and intensity
previously inconceivableinfests the Armed Services citing underground
newspapers published on or aimed at U.S. military bases . . . off-base antiwar
coffeehouses, . . . [and] The nationwide campus-radical offensive against ROTC
and college officer-training.117 Heinl reported that fragging . . . slang in
Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just
aggressive officers and NCOs . . . in 1970 (209) have more than doubled those of
the previous year (96).118 Seymour Hersh recounted an extraordinary work
stoppage . . . a virtual mutiny in the air force in opposition to the Christmas
bombing.119 Describing that incident, Wells added that Not coincidentally many
of the airmen had earlier been stationed at Westover Air Force Base (WAF) in
Massachusetts, scene of intensive organizing of GIs by antiwar activists.120
The movement also changed the media. Wells found echoes of Tom Wickers
attribution of a powerful impulse toward press skepticism . . . provided by the
peace movement in interviews with other prominent commentators and
editors.121
And the movement changed the discourse of government officials and
candidates for office. First, the movement provoked a public relations urge to
build confidence on the home front by exaggerating battlefield prospects [that]
consequently helped create a vulnerability to abrupt disillusionment with the
war effort in the aftermath of the Tet offensive.122 The movements influence,
electoral calculations, and the Tet offensive together had an important
neglected impact on Nixon and the 1968 campaign. Although in 1966 and 1967
Nixon had been insistently demanding more escalation, after Tet there was
a clear-cut change in Nixons thinking [perhaps more accurately, public
statements] about Vietnam. No longer was he calling for victory. No longer
was he calling for escalation. Never before had he suggested cutting a deal
with the Russians. For the first time he was using the words honorable peace,
not victorious peace. Never before had he used the word withdrawal.123After years of calling for military victory in Vietnam, Nixon began to call for
peace instead of victory, adopting proposals that hardly differed from the
policies Johnson had put into effect.124 Similarly, David Meyer showed
the nuclear freeze movements impact on the Republican president whose
election helped spur that movements growth: The Reagan who campaigned
in 1984 was substantially different from the one who took office in 1981 . . .
He no longer spoke of winnable nuclear wars. Indeed he memorized and
117
Colonel Robert D. Heinl, The Collapse of the Armed Forces, in Marvin
E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young and H. Bruce Franklin (eds), Vietnam and
America: A Documented History (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), p. 326.
118
Ibid., p. 324.
119
Hersh, Price of Power, pp. 628n 29n.
120
Wells, War Within, p. 561. Table 1 indicates the extent of contentious protest at WAF.
121
Wells, War Within, pp. 259, 85 86.
122
Richard Falk, Appropriating Tet, World Order Studies Program Occasional Paper
No. 17 (Princeton, NJ: Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, 1988),
p. 7.
123
Ambrose, Nixon, pp. 88, 104, 109 110, 143 144.
124
Ibid., pp. 95, 168.

20 Joel Lefkowitz
frequently repeated the phase nuclear war cannot be won and must never be
fought.125
Changed rhetoric changed action. In the Vietnam case, Nixon committed to
withdrawing troops, a concession to the movement. Hersh observed that the
timing of troop withdrawals was patently illogical given conditions on the
ground in Vietnam, and therefore extraordinary homage to the American peace
movement.126 Similarly, Andrew Katz reported that none of Nixons criteria for
troop withdrawals were present when Nixon announced major withdrawals.127
Comparing Preferences and Policy Outcomes
Comparing the 1973 Paris Peace Accords with Nixons goals and those of the
antiwar movement reveals the impact of the movement.128
Nixons position in 1965: To negotiate with the Vietcong or North Vietnamese
before driving them out of South Vietnam would be like negotiating with Hitler
before the German armies had been driven from France.129 The antiwar
movements position in 1965:
We, the participants in the March on Washington to End the War in Vietnam,
petition Congress to act immediately to end the war. You currently have at your
disposal many schemes, including reconvening the Geneva Conference, negotiation
with the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam, immediate withdrawal, and
UN-supervised elections. Although those among us might differ as to which of
these is most desirable, we are unanimously of the opinion that the war must be
brought to a halt.130

The Paris Peace talks, while consistent with the movements position, required
Nixon to abandon his precondition for negotiation.
As president, the position Nixon continued to insist on after the inauguration
[was] the mutual withdrawal of U.S. and DRV forceswith residual American
troops remaining in South Vietnam until all North Vietnamese were confirmed to
have withdrawnand the preservation of South Vietnam as a separate state.131
The antiwar movements position after Nixons election, expressed in the
Peoples Peace Treaty: a cease-fire, immediate withdrawal of American troops
from Vietnam, release of prisoners of war, free elections in South Vietnam.132
In the end, a peace agreement was reached because the Nixon administration
dropped its insistence on withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the
southern part of the country.133 Despite frustration within the movement because
125

Meyer, How the Cold War Was Really Won, p. 195.

Hersh, Price of Power, p. 515.
127
Andrew Z. Katz, Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Nixon Administration and
the Pursuit of Peace with Honor in Vietnam, Presidential Studies Quarterly 27 (1997), p. 500.
128
Similarly, Knopf explored potential effects of activism . . . by whether there is change
in a policy baseline established by an incumbent president before any protest campaign
took off. Knopf, Domestic Society, p. 51.
129
Ambrose, Nixon, p. 77.
130
Quoted in Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 41.
131
Kimball, Nixons War, p. 108.
132
Zaroulis and Sullivan, Who Spoke Up? p. 346.
133
Morton Halperin, The Lessons Nixon Learned, in Anthony Lake (ed.), The Vietnam
Legacy: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy (New York:
New York University Press, 1976), p. 426.
126

Movement Outcomes and Decline 21

of the years it took to end the war, the peace agreement was much closer to the
movements position than to Nixons.
Other Movement Outcomes
Tilly observed that an enormous range of unanticipated effects qualify logically
as outcomes of social movements.134 In part this is because, as Piven and
Cloward pointed out, elites respond to discontent by proposing reforms with
which they had experience.135 That is, just as movement tactics are drawn from
a repertoire of contention,136 the responses they evoke are drawn from a
repertoire provided by existing traditions.137 The antiwar movement led to
changes in electoral rulesthe reform of the presidential nominating system and
the lowering of the voting ageas well as the Vietnam syndrome.
Reformers in the Democratic Party explicitly responded to the threat posed by
movement disruption. The McGovern-Fraser Commission worried, If we are not
an open party; if we do not represent the demands of change, then the danger is
not that people will go to the Republican Party . . . [but that they] will turn to third
and fourth party politics or the anti-politics of the street.138 Gitlin reported, polls
just before the election showed that only four in ten of McCathys erstwhile
supporters, and only half of Robert Kennedys were ready to vote for
Humphrey.139 Party leaders therefore committed themselves to reform as a
public relations device to recoup defections spurred by the antiwar
movement.140 Reform commission co-chair Donald Fraser attributed reforms to
the experience of the party with antiwar activists who sought to influence the
deliberations of the Democratic convention in Chicago in August 1968, or as
Gitlin put it, the aftertaste of tear gas in the notion that the two-party system
was frozen against reform.141
Proponents of lowering the voting age also emphasized the impact of the
movement. Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) warned that the movement was going to
continue to build and grow. The only question is whether we should ignore it,
perhaps leaving this energy to dam up and burst and follow less-than-wholesome
channels, or whether we should let this force be utilized by society through the
pressure valve of the franchise.142 Similarly, Vice President Spiro Agnew
suggested that once our young people can sound off at the polls, there will be less
need to sound off in the streets.143
134

Tilly, From Interactions to Outcomes, p. 268.

Piven and Cloward, Poor Peoples Movements, p. 33.
136
Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758 1834 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995), p. 41; Tarrow, Power in Movement, pp. 29 42, 91 105.
137
Piven and Cloward, Poor Peoples Movements, p. 33.
138
Quoted in Austin Ranney, Curing the Mischiefs of Faction: Party Reform in America
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 138.
139
Gitlin, Sixties, p. 339.
140
Byron E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping
of Post-Reform Politics (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1983), p. 348.
141
Donald M. Fraser, Democratizing the Democratic Party, in Robert A. Goldwin
(ed.), Political Parties in the Eighties (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980),
p. 117; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 336.
142
Quoted in Benjamin Ginsberg, The Consequences of Consent (Reading, MA: Addison
Wesley, 1983), p. 12.
143
Quoted in Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1970, p. 1570.
135

22 Joel Lefkowitz
Gitlin asserted that The main legacy of the antiwar movement is Americas
reluctance to ship American troops abroad.144 The meaning of the Vietnam
syndrome is varied and contested, primarily, but not only, that any large-scale
American military intervention abroad was doomed to practical failure and
perhaps also to moral iniquity.145 The Vietnam syndrome is also about a
disheartening sense that we cannot trust our own government.146 In March 1991
George H. W. Bush famously declared weve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once
and for all. But quoting both that remark and Bushs statement in April 1991 that
The United States is not going to intervene militarily in Iraqs internal affairs and
risk being drawn into a Vietnam-style quagmire, conservative columnist Charles
Krauthammer wrote, A month ago, George Bush triumphantly declared the
Vietnam syndrome dead. Today, he is its chief purveyor.147 That is, the decision
not to pursue further the 1991 war was further evidence of the Vietnam syndrome
rather than its defeat.
The success of the antiwar movement is also part of the Vietnam syndrome.
Wells found that the totality of the antiwar movement, rather than any specific
element of it, affected decision-makers.148 Wells concluded, therefore, that the
movements endless tactical disputes were a waste of time.149 Active opposition
mattered rather than a particular type of organization or action. The movements
impact may be traced in many other areas as well, but as Winifred Breines points
out, The movement cannot be measured on the basis of its instrumental
achievements alone . . . the whole culture was transformed.150

144

Gitlin, Sixties, p. xi.

E. J. Dionne, Jr., Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome Victory Sweeps Away U.S.
Doomed-to-Failure Feeling, Washington Post, March 4, 1991.
146
John Trinidad, Underestimating John Kerry, Washington Post, January 5, 2004.
147
Charles Krauthammer, Good Morning, Vietnam: The Syndrome Returns, Courtesy
of George Bush, Washington Post, April 19, 1991.
148
Wells, War Within, pp. 255 257.
149
Wells, War Within, p. 256.
150
Winifred Breines, Whose New Left? Journal of American History 75 (1988),
pp. 543 544.
145