The March on the Pentagon, 21 October 1967, an anti-war demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam – Public Domain
The Vietnam War (which ended 50 years ago on April 30, 1975) era caused so many powerful feelings and substantive actions that an alphabetized list might be helpful in sorting some of those issues out. When I registered for the military draft in my small hometown in Rhode Island, I had been in the ROTC brigade for several months at the college I attended. I had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s, so the Cold War and conservatism called the tune in national and international politics. I don’t think I would have known much about Vietnam had it not been for the fact that the ROTC brigade had members who went to Vietnam after graduation. I knew of no one who questioned war in general and the Vietnam War in particular. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a small footnote in memory, and in 1964, when my best friend and I cut chemistry class, we accepted the punishment for having done something we considered patriotic. We had gone off to the airport in Warwick to greet Lyndon Johnson when he arrived to give the keynote speech to open the academic year at Brown University in Providence. Lyndon Johnson carried the mantle of John Kennedy, and that was good enough for us. He would now carry the mantle of expanding the war in Vietnam at levels of violence against agrarian economies that were incredibly weak.
Very slowly, and after completing two years in ROTC, a small contingent of antiwar activists emerged on my campus. Its leader, Joe, would become my best friend in both college and graduate school. Joe was held up for ridicule on campus among other friends. By my senior year, the pointed insults about Joe, in retrospect, may have been a reminder of the conservatism on campus and the school’s traditional support for war.
Graduation weekend saw our group hold an antiwar demonstration during ROTC commissioning ceremonies. Joe had been called into the director of student affairs’ office a few weeks earlier about the planned demonstration and asked about his and our peace group’s motives. I didn’t realize at the time of our demonstration that I had probably been fused with Joe in friends’ minds, and they would have none of that.
Within two days of graduation, I received my notice to report for a physical. I had a bona fide medical condition, but a medical specialist refused to write a letter to my draft board documenting that condition. My family had secured a place in the state’s National Guard for me, and despite my abhorrence of the war at that point, I was sworn into a unit a few days later.
To say I didn’t belong in the military was obvious. I had become very active in antiwar demonstrations, and both the massacre at My Lai and the massacre at Kent State had powerful effects on my antiwar beliefs. The massacre at My Lai was only the tip of the iceberg of mass murder in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Johnson administration wanted body counts, and the US military under General William Westmoreland gave them what they wanted. The shootings at Jackson State were not as well known at that time, most likely because it was a historically Black college. The story of my resistance is best covered in my memoir Against the Wall: Memoir of a Vietnam-Era War Resister (2023).
I continued both activism and protest following the Vietnam War. There was never any long period of time in contemporary US history that did not produce war after war and many injustices. I was involved first with the movement to grant amnesty to Vietnam-era war resisters, both draft and military. The Nuclear Freeze Movement came next, which took place at the same time as the evolving movement against Ronald Reagan’s wars in Central America and specifically the Contra war against the people and government of Nicaragua. Reagan’s purpose, or at least the purpose of those in his administration pulling his strings, was to reverse the Vietnam Syndrome. The syndrome is what the government said I had when I applied to Jimmy Carter’s amnesty program.
Reagan also accelerated the nuclear arms race in space, and until an arms agreement with the Soviet Union was reached, went full throttle on building nuclear weapons.
It was in the next administration, that of George H.W. Bush, when the Vietnam Syndrome was exponentially squashed through the attack against fleeing forces from Kuwait by Iraq in the first Gulf War. That war may have been prevented through diplomacy.
Next, Bill Clinton got the US involved in the former Yugoslavia, ended welfare, increased the prison population, and ended Glass-Steagall, the law separating investment banks from commercial banks. The very real collusion of the duopoly, Democrats and Republicans, began there. Nothing, however, could prepare anyone on the political left, or even a moderate, for the insanity of the intellectually and morally challenged George W. Bush. If an argument could be made to respond to the attack against Al-Qaeda for the September 11, 2001 attacks, then it was lost in the endless war in Afghanistan and the early failure of US forces and commanders to apprehend Osama bin Laden. Bush and company’s regime change and torture in Iraq, along with his Patriot Act, began closing the door on freedom in the US and around the world.
Next came Barack Obama with his faux agenda for hope and change that ended in his bailout of banks in the mortgage crisis. His surge in Afghanistan was yet another lost cause. Obama’s fiasco in Libya was more regime change. Recall Hillary Clinton’s, as Obama’s secretary of state, exaltation at the overthrow of Libya’s government that hastened a civil war.
Nothing could match the rise to power of Donald Trump. Trump is now in the process of dismantling the federal government while using immigrants as his cover. His attacks against science and the environment are monumental. The hapless Joe Biden allowed the genocide in Gaza to begin, and his heir, the also hapless Kamala Harris, allowed a more dangerous Trump to ascend to the throne once again.
Through all of this insanity, I remained connected to protest, or reported on protest through my journalism. Activism and writing, however, were not able to counter the long slide toward the insanity now faced by the destruction of democracy, even a feeble democracy. Allies disappeared long ago into the haze of careerism. I agree somewhat with Mario Puzo’s character Don Corleone when he says that “It makes no difference, it don’t make any difference to me what a man [sic] does for a living, you understand (The Godfather, 1972). But that is not the case as militarism, materialism, and hate morph in contemporary society and across the world. It does matter how people choose to lead their lives. The far right-wing scowlers have jettisoned democracy and taken control of the levers of power along with the few and the rich. The power elite’s take is somewhere around $8 trillion in military spending according to the well-respected Watson Institute’s Costs of War project at Brown University. Those costs take food out of the mouths of children, keep job training and assistance for the cost of higher education away from many people, make homes few and unaffordable, wreck science and the environment, etc. It’s a losing game for humanity.
On January 19, 2001, I boarded a bus in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, as part of a group headed to protest George W. Bush’s inauguration. Readers will recall that Bush had been installed as president by the Supreme Court endorsing the actions of Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, and other officials in Florida. Al Gore and the Democratic Party hardly made a sound in opposition. The person I had planned to go with to the protest did not show up, so I rode alone on a nearly packed bus. During the entire ride to and from Washington, DC, no one, not a single person, spoke or talked to me. That is how bad the state of camaraderie and protest had become. For a very long time it was apparent that it was not the 1960s anymore.
Police were everywhere as the bus approached DC. Protest signs were taken away from protesters if they were attached to any kind of handle. While up against the police barricades on the inauguration parade route, a bodyguard of a television celebrity punched a demonstrator because of something the demonstrator must have said to the celebrity. The ride back to Rhode Island seemed endless, as a snowstorm covered that part of the East Coast. Such was the state of protest politics in 2001, and the repression of protest against the genocide in the Gaza Strip bears some resemblance to that period.
