Vietnam was the war that profoundly shaped my generation. We're all octogenarians now, our numbers are dwindling and our living memories are dying with us. But to this day they still sear our souls. More than 60,000 American dead. More than 2,000,000 Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians dead. Uncounted numbers maimed for life, poisoned by chemical warfare, or dead with heroin needles in their arms.
I am proud to say that for more than a decade I was a dedicated anti-war activist. And I confess with deep regret, that born of anguish and rage, for a few of those years some of my extreme, self-righteous, political positions and provocative statements and actions, were ineffective and counter-productive.
When anti-war activists met Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi and Paris, the Vietnamese urged pro-peace Americans to unite everyone who could be united around the most important issue — which at that time was ending the bombing and beginning peace negotiations. Uniting all who could be united meant building broad coalitions and alliances among people whose analyses and interpretation of the war diverged widely. A minority of us in the student left, however, copped an egotistical, "If you're not with us you're against us" attitude. We were too pure to make common cause with those we saw as foes, too militant to temper our extreme rhetoric, and too 'revolutionary' to curb our provocative actions that alienated potential allies.
So for a few years I was a part of the problem rather than part of the solution. And I was not alone in that. So much so, that SDS leader Todd Gitlin would later note that by the late sixties, "The only thing the American people hated more than the Vietnam War was the anti-war movement." Which did neither the Vietnamese people nor American draftees any good whatsoever. We were wrong, but it was not we who paid the price.
In the 1968 election, it was self-evident that Nixon would be far worse on Vietnam and racial justice than Humphrey. But we cared not, for we were righteous in our legitimate revulsion against Johnson, his war, his administration, his convention, and his vice-president. We condemned and excoriated both major candidates equally and campaigned for Eldridge Cleaver on the Peace & Freedom Party ticket. Cleaver got less than 1% of the vote and the world got Nixon.
With Nixon we got five more years of war. With Nixon we got an expanded war with the invasion of Cambodia and a massive bombing campaign that dropped twice the explosive tonnage on Indochina than was used in all of World War II. With Nixon we got the Kent State and Jackson State massacres that cast a chilling, crippling pall over anti-war and racial-justice protests across the nation. With Nixon we got an Attorney General and an administration committed to white-backlash politics, courting segregationists, and rolling back civil rights. Which is why I now view my 1968, "plague on all their houses" stand as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
There is no way to know what Humphrey would have done had he won. But we do know that to some extent presidents and their administrations take actions and enact policies favored by their political base. A significant portion of the Democratic base opposed the Vietnam War and supported justice initiatives. The Republican base that Nixon served was quite the opposite, they wanted war, cops, bigotry and Jim Crow.
Copyright © Bruce Hartford, 2024
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