Vietnam War Protest Quotes

During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.

We quickly became friends with other art faculty members such as the ceramist Jim Leedy and his wife Jean and art historian/artist Bill Kortlander and his wife Betty. I also began taking classes in Southeast Asian history with John Cady, who had resigned from his position at the U.S.[CB4] [mo5]  State Department because he thought it would be a huge mistake to get involved in a “land war in Southeast Asia.” In 1966, his warnings were starting to become all too obvious as the Vietnam war grew and protests against it emerged. Dr. Cady was in the thick of the protests and was even being shadowed by the F.B.I. After I finished my BFA in art in 1966, I began work on a master’s degree in history at Dr. Cady’s urging. He and his wife became frequent guests at our parties

Look for some peace organization to join. It will look small at first, and pitiful and helpless, but that’s how movements start. That’s how the movement against the Vietnam War started. It started with handfuls of people who thought they were helpless, thought they were powerless. But remember, this power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. When people stop obeying, they have no power. When workers go on strike, huge corporations lose their power. When consumers boycott, huge business establishments have to give in. When soldiers refuse to fight, as so many soldiers did in Vietnam, so many deserters, so many fraggings, acts of violence by enlisted men against officers in Vietnam, B-52 pilots refusing to fly bombing missions anymore, war can’t go on. When enough soldiers refuse, the government has to decide we can’t continue. So, yes, people have the power. If they begin to organize, if they protest, if they create a strong enough movement, they can change things.

Epictetus has had a long-standing resonance in the United States; his uncompromising moral rigour chimed in well with Protestant Christian beliefs and the ethical individualism that has been a persistent vein in American culture. His admirers ranged from John Harvard and Thomas Jefferson in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth. More recently, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale wrote movingly of how his study of Epictetus at Stanford University enabled him to survive the psychological pressure of prolonged torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam between 1965 and 1973. Stockdale’s story formed the basis for a light-hearted treatment of the moral power of Stoicism in Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full (1998).52

Now. 1973. Exactly." He tipped back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. "So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we've drawn back into our shells, wondering what we have done and what do we believe.? And is there any purpose to our lives?

While in the United States and Europe "revolution" was an excuse to sell pop music, stage protests, and hold festivals, it was being played for keeps in Asia. Young people were not just challenging their elders but pushing them aside, expelling, imprisoning, and in many cases executing them, all the while extolling the young as the righteous vanguard, their very youth a badge of purity. They were, by definition, forward-thinking. And in Hue they were armed.

It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these (perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines. THE

Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement—against the Vietnam War—was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all.

Norman Morrison soaked himself in petrol and burned himself on the steps of the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam war...Would it perhaps have taken greater courage to set fire to the President? A body of men who sleep soundly on a daily programme of sanctioned mass-murder are surely only distrubed by personal danger.

Only the myopic magnifying lens of the television camera maintains the demonstration, march, and picketing as a modality of political expression; they have otherwise faded into meaninglessness since the end of the Vietnam War with the shift of urban form and activity. These acts and activities have been displaced over the past decade from the square and main street to the windswept emptiness of City Hall Mall or Federal Building Plaza. To encounter a ragtag mob of protesters in such places today renders them enve more pathetic, their marginality enforced by a physcial displacement into so unimportant, uninhabited, and unloved a civic location.

What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism - namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar 'movement' with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say - two years later, in 1969 - so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were 'giving aid and comfort to the enemy.' What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war - they made that war last longer. That's what I saw.

Satan's masterpiece of counterfeiting is the doctrine that there are only two choices, and he will show us what they are. It is true that there are only two ways, but by pointing us the way he wants us to take and then showing us a fork in that road, he convinces us that we are making the vital choice, when actually we are choosing between branches in his road. Which one we take makes little difference to him, for both lead to destruction. This is the polarization we find in the world today. Thus we have the choice between Shiz and Coriantumr-- which all the Jaredites were obliged to make. We have the choice between the wicked Lamanites (and they were that) and the equally wicked (Mormon says "more wicked") Nephites. Or between the fleshpots of Egypt and the stews of Babylon, or between the land pirates and the sea pirates of World War I, or between white supremacy and black supremacy, or between Vietnam and Cambodia, or between Bushwhachers and Jayhawkers, or between China and Russia, or between Catholic and Protestant, or between fundamentalist and atheist, or between right and left-- all of which are true rivals who hate each other. A very clever move of Satan!-- a subtlety that escapes us most of the time. So I ask Latter-day Saints, "What is your position frankly (I'd lake to take a vote here) regarding the merits of cigarettes vs. cigars, wine vs. beer, or heroin vs. LSD?" It should be apparent that you take no sides. By its nature the issue does not concern you. It is simply meaningless as far as your life is concerned. "What, are you not willing to stand up and be counted?" No, I am not. The Saints took no sides in that most passionately partisan of wars, the Civil War, and they never regretted it.

I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say—two years later, in 1969—so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war—they made that war last longer. That’s what I saw.

Theirs was a strange generation. They grew up with headlines about marches, protests, and sit-ins; they watched the Vietnam War and Woodstock live on color television; they all wanted to be H. Rap Brown and Jane Fonda and Patty Hearst; and when they turned eighteen and felt the full conviction of their revolutionary duty, they all voted for a soft-spoken peanut farmer who was systematically humiliated from his earliest days in office until what seemed his very last.

I believe that President Reagan can say these things only because he knows that the American people will never hold him accountable for what he says; it is history that holds you accountable, and I've already expressed my opinion that Americans are not big on history. How many of them even remember their own, recent history? Was twenty year ago so long ago for Americans? Do they remember October 21, 1967? Fifty thousand antiwar demonstrators were in Washington; I was there; that was the "March on the Pentagon" -remember? And two years later--in October of '69--there were fifty thousand people in Washington again; they were carrying flashlights, they were asking for peace. There were a hundred thousand asking for peace in Boston Common; there were two hundred fifty thousand in New York. Ronald Reagan had not yet numbed the United States, but he had succeeded in putting California to sleep; he described the Vietnam protests as "giving aid and comfort to the enemy." As president, he still didn't know who the enemy was.

The library was ... scattered with odd cushions and strange padded built-in furniture added a few years ago to placate the rioting students of the time, who could never seem to make up their minds whether they were angriest about Viet Nam, about being made to learn a foreign language, or about being made to sit at a hard wooden desk while they did it. The College, being unable to do anything about Viet Nam and unwilling to do anything about the foreign language requirement, had reformed the furniture in the library.

The M-16 sure is a marvelous gun, and in a god-awful war it provides some keen fun. The bullet it fires appears too small to harm but it makes a big hole and can tear off an arm. Single shot, semi, or full automatic, a real awesome weapon, ’tho in performance sporadic. But listen to Ichord and forget that stuck bolt, for you aren’t as important as a kickback from Colt. So carry your rifle (they don’t give a damn), just pray you won’t need it while you’re in Vietnam. The M-16 is issue, though we all feel trapped. More GIs would protest, but somehow they got zapped.

Funny that the people who aren’t doing the fighting are the most tired of it,” Evan said. “We never knew anything about people being sick of it, or protests, or people thinking we were the bad guys. All our news was censored. We thought everyone would be proud of us, like they are of our dads. We were out there, putting everything on the line every day because that’s what our country told us to do, under conditions that would make a saint afraid to look God in the face, and we were doing our best. I knew there were a few anti-war protests before I left, but I never expected it to be like this…

Most people remember COINTELPRO from the days of the Black Panthers, Yippies, and other revolutionary groups who threatened our government during the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war. Sensing that these groups might incite American citizens into radical action, the FBI sent in agents to agitate members of these various groups, often pitting them against each other through various forms of subterfuge, such as blackmail. It appears that the CIA, FBI, and NSA are now sending their goons into the metaphysical marketplace, making sure that people who think they are aspiring to higher and positively transformative things are, in reality, only becoming more self-indulgent, disconnected, and confused. The biggest influx of these agents occurred during the blossoming of the "human potential" movement in the early '70s, through such institutions as Esalen. Legions of people threw away their protest banners and followed their bliss during a time when directly addressing the socio-political problems of the day was imperative. Since then, the emphasis on personal development - and more recently, the You Create Your Own Reality movement - a significant segment of the population has been brainwashed into disdaining all socio-political issues. For what better way to disempower people than to have them focus on their personal evolution at the expense of their families, communities, and the countries they live in?

In a profile of Robert Kennedy, Morgenthau explained how emotion, even in the best of causes, could obscure reason and rationality, and what he said about Kennedy applied to the student demonstrators as well: “Robert Kennedy was not reflective but emotional,” Morgenthau remarked. When he saw evil and suffering in the world, he felt he had to do something. “But since he was unaware of the ambiguity of moral judgments, he was also unaware of the moral and pragmatic ambiguity of the political act performed in emotional response to a moral judgment. His approach was morally fundamentalist and politically simplistic.” Much like the student protesters, many of whom became Kennedy followers after he came to share their passion about the war. Moral fundamentalism and perfectionism were their credo. Emotion, not reflection, determined a policy of resistance that was no-policy. Except for a shared opposition to the Vietnam war, the stern, Nietzschean, hyperintellectual Morgenthau and the idealistic, impassioned students had almost nothing in common. Their intellectual premises barely overlapped; their mind-sets functioned in different universes. As Morgenthau had written in Politics Among Nations, “A man who was nothing but ‘moral man’ would be a fool.” The students were “moral men” and proud of the fact. And then in 1968, as if to pound his point home, Morgenthau took a step that would have been incomprehensible to most of them. He came out in support of Richard Nixon for president.

None of them was impressed with Gravel, who at present was their commander. He had, in their eyes, failed them. He had sent Meadows and Downs out on missions that were foredoomed. It wasn’t all his fault, because he was getting pushed around from above, and he had complained about it bitterly and consistently. But part of being a leader was being able to push up as well as down. You didn’t ask men to risk everything on a mission that you did not believe in yourself. Gravel had been doing this now for several days. The men knew when they were being misused. This was the real deal, not some classroom exercise. These were blood decisions. They were the most important ones a military commander is asked to make. If you knew more because of where you were and what you saw, then you stood your ground. You didn’t just protest; if need be, you refused. You put your judgment on the line. This might destroy your career—hell, it would certainly destroy your career—but you accepted that, because whatever happened to you, your career, your reputation, these were minor things by comparison. Lives were at stake. A real leader knew his responsibility was not first and foremost to himself; it was to his men, and the mission. What mattered in combat, what really mattered, was not only understanding why you asked men to risk their lives, but making them understand. Men would willingly risk their lives, but they needed to know that it counted. And they needed to know they had a chance. If the commander believed those things himself, he could convince his men. The problem here was that neither the young company commanders nor Gravel held that belief.

They wish he never came back. He is their worst nightmare. He was not supposed to come back. And now this college professor. Know where he was when the government sent us in there with one arm tied behind our backs? He was out there leading the fucking protesters. They pay them, when they go to college, to teach, to teach the kids, not to fucking protest the Vietnam War. They didn’t give us a fucking chance. They say we lost the war. We didn’t lose the war, the government lost the war. But when fancy-pants professors felt like it, instead of teaching class some day they go picketing out there against the war, and that is the thanks he gets for serving his country. That is the thanks for the shit he had to put up with day in and day out. He can’t get a goddamn night’s sleep. He hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in fucking twenty-six years.

Why were hippies such a threat, from the President on down to local levels, objects for surveillance and disruptions? Many of the musicians had the potential to become political. There were racial overtones to the black-white sounds, harmony between Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix. Black music was the impetus that drove the Rolling Stones into composing and performing. The war in Vietnam we escalated. What if they stopped protesting the war in Southeast Asia and turned to expose domestic policies at home with the same energy? One of the Byrds stopped singing at Monterey Pop to question the official Warren Report conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a “lone assassin.” Bob Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home album features a picture of Lyndon Johnson on the cover of Time. By 1966, LBJ had ordered writers and critics of his commission report on the JFK murder under surveillance. That research was hurting him. Rock concerts and Oswald. What next?

The New York Times tells us change is necessary and protest desirable, but within limits. Poverty should be protested, but the laws should not be broken. Hence, the Poor People’s Campaign, occupying tents in Washington in the spring of 1968, is praiseworthy; but its leader, Ralph Abernathy, is deservedly jailed for violating an ordinance against demonstrating near the Capitol. The Vietnam war is wrong, but if Dr. Spock is found by a jury and judge to have violated the draft law, he must accept his punishment as right because that is the rule of the game. Thus, exactly at that moment when we have begun to suspect that law is congealed injustice, that the existing order hides an everyday violence against body and spirit, that our political structure is fossilized, and that the noise of change—however scary—may be necessary, a cry rises for “law and order.” Such a moment becomes a crucial test of whether the society will sink back to a spurious safety or leap forward to its own freshening. We

Near Fort Jackson, South Carolina, the first "GI coffeehouse" was set up, a place where soldiers could get coffee and doughnuts, find antiwar literature, and talk freely with others. It was called the UFO, and lasted for several years before it was declared a "public nuisance" and closed by court action. But other GI coffeehouses sprang up in half a dozen other places across the country. An antiwar "bookstore" was opened near Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and another one at the Newport, Rhode Island, naval base. Underground newspapers sprang up at military bases across the country; by 1970 more than fifty were circulating. Among them: About Face in Los Angeles; Fed Up! in Tacoma, Washington; Short Times at Fort Jackson; Vietnam GI in Chicago; Grafiti in Heidelberg, Germany; Bragg Briefs in North Carolina; Last Harass at Fort Gordon, Georgia; Helping Hand at Mountain Home Air Base, Idaho. These newspapers printed antiwar articles, gave news about the harassment of GIs and practical advice on the legal rights of servicemen, told how to resist military domination.

What I saw in Washington that October were a lot of Americans who were genuinely dismayed by what their country was doing in Vietnam; I also saw a lot of other Americans who were self-righteously attracted to a most childish notion of heroism—namely, their own. They thought that to force a confrontation with soldiers and policemen would not only elevate themselves to the status of heroes; this confrontation, they deluded themselves, would expose the corruption of the political and social system they loftily thought they opposed. These would be the same people who, in later years, would credit the antiwar “movement” with eventually getting the U.S. armed forces out of Vietnam. That was not what I saw. I saw that the righteousness of many of these demonstrators simply helped to harden the attitudes of those poor fools who supported the war. That is what makes what Ronald Reagan would say—two years later, in 1969—so ludicrous: that the Vietnam protests were “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” What I saw was that the protests did worse than that; they gave aid and comfort to the idiots who endorsed the war—they made that war last longer. That’s what I saw.

But there is also (though much of this is kept from us, to keep us intimidated and without hope) the bubbling of change under the surface of obedience: the growing revulsion against the endless wars (I think of the Russian women in the nineties, demanding their country end its military intervention in Chechnya, as did Americans during the Vietnam war); the insistence of women all over the world that they will no longer tolerate abuse and subordination—we see, for instance, the new international movement against female genital mutilation, and the militancy of welfare mothers against punitive laws. There is civil disobedience against the military machine, protest against police brutality directed especially at people of color. In the United States, we see the educational system, a burgeoning new literature, alternative radio stations, a wealth of documentary films outside the mainstream, even Hollywood itself and sometimes television—compelled to recognize the growing multiracial character of the nation. Yes, we have in this country, dominated by corporate wealth and military power and two antiquated political parties, what a fearful conservative characterized as “a permanent adversarial culture” challenging the present, demanding a new future.

At the weekend, I asked Niem to show me the monument to the Vietnam War. “You mean the ‘Resistance War Against America,’” he said. Of course, I should have realized he wouldn’t call it the Vietnam War. Niem drove me to one of the city’s central parks and showed me a small stone with a brass plate, three feet high. I thought it was a joke. The protests against the Vietnam War had united a generation of activists in the West. It had moved me to send blankets and medical equipment. More than 1.5 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans had died. Was this how the city commemorated such a catastrophe? Seeing that I was disappointed, Niem drove me to see a bigger monument: a marble stone, 12 feet high, to commemorate independence from French colonial rule. I was still underwhelmed. Then Niem asked me if I was ready to see the proper war monument. He drove a little way further, and pointed out of the window. Above the treetops I could see a large pagoda, covered in gold. It seemed about 300 feet high. He said, “Here is where we commemorate our war heroes. Isn’t it beautiful?” This was the monument to Vietnam’s wars with China. The wars with China had lasted, on and off, for 2,000 years. The French occupation had lasted 200 years. The “Resistance War Against America” took only 20 years. The sizes of the monuments put things in perfect proportion. It was only by comparing them that I could understand the relative insignificance of “the Vietnam War” to the people who now live in Vietnam.

FACT 4 – There is more to the creation of the Manson Family and their direction than has yet been exposed. There is more to the making of the movie Gimme Shelter than has been explained. This saga has interlocking links to all the beautiful people Robert Hall knew. The Manson Family and the Hell’s Angels were instruments to turn on enemy forces. They attacked and discredited politically active American youth who had dropped out of the establishment. The violence came down from neo-Nazis, adorned with Swastikas both in L.A. and in the Bay Area at Altamont. The blame was placed on persons not even associated with the violence. When it was all over, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were the icing on this cake, famed musicians associated with a racist, neo-Nazi murder. By rearranging the facts, cutting here and there, distorting evidence, neighbors and family feared their own youth. Charles Manson made the cover of Life with those wide eyes, like Rasputin. Charles Watson didn’t make the cover. Why not? He participated in all the killings. Manson wasn’t inside the house. Manson played a guitar and made records. Watson didn’t. He was too busy taking care of matters at the lawyer’s office prior to the killings, or with officials of Young Republicans. Who were Watson’s sponsors in Texas, where he remained until his trial, separate from the Manson Family’s to psychologically distance him from the linking of Watson to the murders he actually committed. “Pigs” was scrawled in Sharon Tate’s house in blood. Was this to make blacks the suspects? Credit cards of the La Bianca family were dropped intentionally in the ghetto after the massacre. The purpose was to stir racial fears and hatred. Who wrote the article, “Did Hate Kill Tate?”—blaming Black Panthers for the murders? Lee Harvey Oswald was passed off as a Marxist. Another deception. A pair of glasses was left on the floor of Sharon Tate’s home the day of the murder. They were never identified. Who moved the bodies after the killers left, before the police arrived? The Spahn ranch wasn’t a hippie commune. It bordered the Krupp ranch, and has been incorporated into a German Bavarian beer garden. Howard Hughes knew George Spahn. He visited this ranch daily while filming The Outlaw. Howard Hughes bought the 516 acres of Krupp property in Nevada after he moved into that territory. What about Altamont? What distortions and untruths are displayed in that movie? Why did Mick Jagger insist, “the concert must go on?” There was a demand that filmmakers be allowed to catch this concert. It couldn’t have happened the same in any other state. The Hell’s Angels had a long working relationship with law enforcement, particularly in the Oakland area. They were considered heroes by the San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers when they physically assaulted the dirty anti-war hippies protesting the shipment of arms to Vietnam. The laboratory for choice LSD, the kind sent to England for the Stones, came from the Bay Area and would be consumed readily by this crowd. Attendees of the concert said there was “a compulsiveness to the event.” It had to take place. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, made the legal arrangements. Ruby had complained that Belli prohibited him from telling the full story of Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder (another media event). There were many layers of cover-up, and many names have reappeared in subsequent scripts. Sen. Philip Hart, a member of the committee investigating illegal intelligence operations inside the US, confessed that his own children told him these things were happening. He had refused to believe them. On November 18, 1975, Sen. Hart realized matters were not only out of hand, but crimes of the past had to be exposed to prevent future outrages. How shall we ensure that it will never happen again? It will happen repeatedly unless we can bring ourselves to understand and accept that it did go on.

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

Horwitt describes an occasion in the spring of 1972 when Alinsky organized a student protest at Tulane University’s annual lecture week. A group of anti–Vietnam War protesters wanted to disrupt a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, and an advocate for President Nixon’s Vietnam policies. While the students planned to picket the speech and shout antiwar slogans, Alinsky told them that their approach was wrong because it might get them punished or expelled. Besides, it lacked creativity and imagination. Alinsky advised the students to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan—complete with robes and hoods—and whenever Bush said anything in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and holler and wave signs and banners saying: “The KKK Supports Bush.” This is what the students did, and it proved very successful, getting lots of media attention with no adverse repercussions for the protesters.17 On

While other young Americans were caught up in Civil Rights Marches, the Vietnam War, protest songs, and psychedelic drugs, Sara Got was hearing voices in her head and trying to relate to them.

By the early summer of 1968, many of the hippies in the Sierra Madre Canyon were into Scientology. Either that, or they were into hard drugs. It was a fractured, confusing, disheartening time: in April, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, followed two months later by Robert Kennedy. Riots had erupted in Watts, and then at the Chicago Democratic Convention. The anti-war protests, bloody and embattled, now seemed futile. Increasingly, many young searchers who’d drifted to the Canyon, particularly those just back from Vietnam, were using heroin. Shady characters followed them, hanging around on the fringes, dealing drugs. The scene in the Canyon became increasingly tense. After one young man was killed in a gunfight near his house, Jeff Hawkins decided it was time to move on.

If we once manufactured the consent of the population for everything from the Vietnam War to the bombing of Kosovo to the occupation of Iraq, we’re now manufacturing discontent. It’s the only way to prevent a popular uprising. It can’t hold. As we saw with the election of Trump and with the Bernie Sanders campaign (and with countless protest movements around the world, from Catalonia to the Gilets Jaunes), voters are not completely stupid. They know enough to be angry. Commercial news media has tried frantically to come up with enough red capes to keep us charging forward, but they’re running out of gimmicks.

It’s 1968, and Aiken Day’s life is in chaos. Living in Windsor, Ontario, he suffers bleak visions and nightmares—flashbacks to the killing, the slaughter of the Essex Scottish Regiment on the shale beaches of Dieppe. His wife, the elegant former professor Paris Day, has run off with a civil rights group whose members have traded peaceful protests for violent bank heists, and their son Adam, a young black man in a white, white world, seems ready to follow in her footsteps. While Aiken sets off to discover the truth behind an FBI story about his wife, Bobby Kennedy and his team criss-cross the US on his run for the Democratic nomination for the presidency, campaigning to end racial discrimination and the Vietnam war. A sprawling, Pynchonesque novel that spans Canada and the US, Pushing Bobby’s Cadillac explores the hope and anguish spawned by the year 1968.

Since Soviet “mistakes” (including the murder of millions of its own citizens) had ruined its chances for providing a haven for existentialist politics, Sartre was forced to take on the American juggernaut alone. America’s global empire, he warned, was being assembled by means of its control over a global mass communications and technological network and the “world economic system.” “This One World,” as Sartre described it, was actually a nightmare of American cultural and political hegemony, enabling six percent of the earth’s population to dominate the other ninety-four percent.41 He began looking desperately for humanist alternatives. He turned to other Marxist countries, including Tito’s Yugoslavia, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam (declaring in 1967 that “the Vietnamese are fighting for all men, and the Americans against all men”), and still later Mao’s China.42 He also took up other anti-Western crusades. He led a host of leftist intellectuals in protests against France’s war in Algeria in 1954 to ’56 and embraced the cause of the Marxist FLN rebels—which led to his friendship with Frantz Fanon.

Antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod’s openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (the initials “SS” were intentional); the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a host of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, seemed even more “un-American” after the great anti-Nazi war. Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti–Wall Street, pro–soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt. Today a “politics of resentment” rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same “internal enemies” once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights. Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and “degenerate” artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany or the Italian Arditi, and attack the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had “stabbed them in the back.” Fortunately I was wrong (so far). Since September 11, 2001, however, civil liberties have been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists. The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy. Around such reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

It was the Vietnam war that had set the left on this perfectionist course. Whereas Kissinger (and Hans Morgenthau) had seen the conflict as a mistake of America’s good intentions, the student protesters of the 1960s could think only in terms of black and white: the war was “evil,” meaning that those who prosecuted it were evil too, and no one was identified more with the war than Henry Kissinger. “Vietnam,” Bob Woodward has written, “was like a stone around his neck.” Opposition to the war was a sign of righteousness, with the children of light arrayed against the children of darkness. This was the foreign policy legacy that the antiwar protesters of the 1960s passed on to the rest of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. International affairs weren’t a matter of selecting among often cruel choices but of simply choosing sides. One of his critics condemned Kissinger for pursuing “endless war as a matter of course,” ignoring his Realist contention that there is “an irreducible element of power involved in international politics.” During the years of the Cold War, he insisted, American power was employed “to prevent Soviet military and political expansion,” explaining to a generation unable to see anything beyond Vietnam that “the Cold War was not a policy mistake—though some mistakes were of course made.” Vietnam had turned the attention of the left away from the realities of power to the sanctimonious realms of self-righteousness. But as Kissinger was to preach again and again: “So long as the post–Cold War generation of national leaders is embarrassed to elaborate an unapologetic concept of enlightened national interest, it will achieve progressive paralysis, not moral elevation.

Some might have opposed the war because they were isolationists. But America’s bipartisan, postwar consensus was that we had a responsibility to contain Communist aggression. In any event, the anti-war protesters liked to assume they represented a higher morality, and it would be hard to square isolationism with idealism. At best, one might call it naïve; at worst, short-sighted and selfish.

I sat in front of the TV hour after hour watching the news about how Trump was fucking up the government’s response to the spreading corona virus infection. Why didn’t he invoke the federal government’s power under the Defense Production Act as soon as the virus hit Washington State? All the experts knew how fast-spreading and dangerous this corona virus could be? Instead, he ignores the CDC’s advice and downplays the risk to the nation’s health. Not until mid April, when it’s way too late, does Trump finally use some of the government’s power under the DPA, and even then it’s a half-assed measure. Not enough testing, not enough ventilators, not enough PPE, not enough swabs. The number of infections kept rising. By the end of March the US led the world in infections and deaths caused by the virus. What does Trump do? He refuses to wear a mask. He’s not going to look like a weakling. Testing? Overrated. It increases the number of infections. Why doesn’t the country have enough PPE and ventilators? Obama’s fault. The President is in charge, but if there’s any failure, it’s the fault of governors and mayors. He keeps repeating his mantra, “The situation is under control.” Pence’s team will whip the virus. Or was it Jared’s team? This virus isn’t as bad as the flu. America always wins. Doesn’t matter who or what the enemy is, we always triumph. We’re going to kill that little bug. Those people wearing masks are doing it to spite me, Donald J. Trump, the greatest President in history. “The situation is under control.” But the deaths keep mounting. It surpasses annual deaths from auto accidents, 34,000. It surpasses US deaths in the Vietnam War, 58,000. Next, it’s going to surpass total deaths of US soldiers in World War I, 116,500, and it’s not going to stop there. What the fuck!? This is the United States of America! We’re supposed to have the best healthcare in the world, the best of everything. We’re Number One! Yeah, Trump made America great again. He said with him as President America would win so much we’d get tired of winning. Right on, man! We are Number One – in corona virus infections and deaths! After spending all day switching back and forth among the cable news networks on TV, I’d turn off the television and get on my laptop and rant on Twitter about what an idiot the President was. That was my life during the lockdown. From "Anarchist, Republican... Assassin

Alsop rightly saw Morgenthau as one of the most influential leaders of the opposition to the war in Vietnam and, therefore, someone who had to be discredited with improbable charges of foolishness and appeasement. But the truth about Morgenthau’s position in the antiwar movement was complicated. He wasn’t really a protest leader. He stood almost alone among the dissenters. His power-oriented Realpolitik perspective was no more congenial to the student demonstrators than it was to the occupants of the White House. As a culturally sophisticated European of deep conservative instincts, Morgenthau saw the unruly students as little more than an embarrassment. “The New Left is essentially anarchistic,” he told a journalist, “a still-born movement that can have no influence on American politics.” He rejected the young leftists’ Marxist explanations that the war was economically determined. “From an economic point of view, the Vietnam war is an absurdity,” while so-called moral objections left him cold. For Morgenthau, opposition to the war could rest on one of three foundations: an economic one, an absolute moral one because “this kind of indiscriminate destruction cannot be condoned on any ground,” and his own pragmatic position that “this particular war” was not one the United States should be fighting. He distanced himself from so important a protest leader as Noam Chomsky because Chomsky was basing his opposition on a combination of the first two foundations—a “vulgar economic determinism” and a “moral absolutism.” He was even ready to rebuke Fulbright for being “dangerously naïve concerning the threat posed by the Soviet Union and Communist China.

In criticizing Chomsky, Morgenthau made the point that his moral absolutism was simply the mirror image of the moralism that dominated the thinking of the policymakers in Washington. Both divided the world into good and evil nations; the difference was in the countries they chose to label good and evil. For the student demonstrators, the United States now fell into the “evil” category. Kissinger said much the same thing about the students from a different position on the political map. The young protesters had passion but no analysis and were unable to formulate any responsible policy for Vietnam. They had allowed morality, or more accurately moralism, to do their thinking for them. Kissinger observed that at the start of the war, the supporters “did so in the name of morality. Before the war was over, many opposed it in the name of morality.” What was once good was now evil, but even if positions had changed, the thinking had not—it never lost its Manichean quality. This, Kissinger said, was “American exceptionalism turned on itself” and had nothing in common with the Realpolitik principles of both Morgenthau and Kissinger.

All of the self-justifying explanations by the supporters of the war—selfishness, cowardice, decadence, ignorance, Communist sympathies—were excuses that failed to confront the basic challenge that the protesters (and Morgenthau too) were raising about the war, namely that the very reasons the United States had become involved in Vietnam, the Domino Theory and the doctrine of a monolithic Communism, were fundamentally false and had no application to the world as it actually existed. The real question to be answered is how “the kids” could have been right about this and the country’s political leaders and opinion makers so very wrong.

We are in a decade, perhaps an age, when all sorts and conditions of men are rising up to protest (declare against) all sorts and conditions in our human situation. Everywhere, the "have-nots" are challenging the "haves"; the morally awake are prodding the indifferently asleep; the impatient are threatening the patient; both the Left and the Right are attacking the Center; the new thinks, that it despises the old. In a well-worn sense, "whatever is" is wrong. The current traitor is the middle class, and treason is gradually being defined as the liberal view. The choice offered seems to be be either a soma-soaked brotherly "happening" with Whirl as benevolent king or the orderly, albeit vicious, tyranny of Orwell's 1984. Within our own borders the arenas are brimming and booming: inner city ghettos, rural slums, local draft boards, P.T.A. committees, factories exuding smog, churches gathering affluence, campuses and coffee houses, Selma and Cicero, the Mississippi Delta and the cities of Detroit and Newark, nuclear test sites and pornographic paperbacks. Under attack are segregation, the war in Vietnam, control of the universities, inequalities in selective service, Christian hypocrisies, second-class citizenship, white collar culture, poverty, river pollution, and the BOMB.

By the time I returned to campus, however, the students were of a new breed, not interested in politics or the world like the previous generation. Their tender eyes were no longer exposed daily to stories and pictures of atrocity and terror for which they might have felt responsible, given that they were citizens of a democracy destroying another country in order to save it.

The following Monday, May 4, Ohio National Guard soldiers opened fire on war protesters at Kent State University, killing four, only two of whom were demonstrating.

I remember when we went into Kezar Stadium on the march (April 15, 1967, San Francisco) playing that song—I felt like I was part of some surrealistic dream. We were riding along in this truck. The band was playing. It was like a misty kind of rain. It was early in the morning. The streets were lined with people hanging out of windows and everything. And we were going up the street. I was just stoned out of my head on LSD, everything kind of like vibrating and I was looking around and you could see soldiers and people sneering and you see pictures of napalmed children and signs saying “End the War” and we were playing this joyous incredible music and people were dancing all around the truck just dancing and throwing flowers up in the air and everything and we were singing, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!” And it was like we were sort of heading off to these beautiful pastoral gas chambers, we were all going to parade ourselves into these gas chambers and then they were going to wipe us out… I mean, if you gotta go, you might as well go out dancing and singing.

The rift pitted soldiers against protesters, sons against fathers, citizens against politicians, friends against friends, veterans against veterans, all in the context of a war that should never have been fought and that involved terrible loss, not only of the soldiers who were killed, maimed, or driven crazy but to the moral standing of the nation before the world.

James A. Baker III, George H. W. Bush’s chief of staff, recalled a day in October 1992 when President Bush was approached by four Republican members of Congress who had an idea for how he could win reelection. “They told him the only way to win was to hammer his challenger Bill Clinton’s patriotism for protesting the Vietnam War while in London and visiting Moscow as a young man,” Baker writes. Bush didn’t reject the idea out of hand; in fact, he thought it might work. But when Baker heard that the only way to reveal this information would be to “contact the Russians or the British,” he realized that the administration “absolutely could not do that.” Why would someone as canny and strategic as Baker be so opposed to the idea of asking a foreign power to help his boss win an election? Because opposition to foreign interference in our elections is as old as America itself.

As a former army officer, he felt he had knowledge the protesters didn’t have. Moreover, his brother-in-law, Donald Sampson, had gone to fight in Southeast Asia. Brand wasn’t for the war (he considered himself to be on the “psychedelic side” in the political dispute over Vietnam), but he had a basic sympathy for the enlisted men, and he bridled when he heard that protesters were calling them baby killers.

As the Vietnam War raged on and protests tore the country apart, Brand did his best to stay above the fray. When he set out to become a publisher in the fall of 1968, just months after Chicago police beat and tear-gassed protesters, he decreed the new publication would have nothing to say about the Vietnam War, and he stuck to what he believed was a no-politics editorial policy for the first three years he published the Catalog.

Nixon began his presidential term by trying to appeal to Movement Conservatives without undermining the liberal consensus. But his vague promises of “peace with honor” in Vietnam caught up with him when instead of ending the war, he escalated it. Protesters called him out, and he responded by conflating loyalty to America with loyalty to the president.

Unlike the civil rights struggles of African Americans or the protest politics surrounding the Vietnam War, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements represent a decidedly underexplored aspect of 1960s New Left radicalism. Outside of the communities themselves, the names, places, and events of these two movements are virtually unknown.

Cuando el movimiento chicano empezó, vimos en Nuevo México, a las Chicana y a otras, trabajando para recuperar las tierras perdidas con la guerra de 1846-48 contra Estados Unidos, miles salieron de las escuelas secundarias para protestar contra el racismo, y muchas se pusieron Boinas Marrones para defender sus comunidades. Nosotros nos unimos a la United Farm Workers como campesinas y apoyamos el boicoteo. Nosotros marchamos en contra de la Guerra de Vietnam el 29 de Agosto de 1970, solo para ser perseguidos, acosadas y maltratadas con los gases lacrimógenos de la policía que incluso mató a tres chicanos ese día. When the Chicano movement began, we saw Chicanas and others in New Mexico working to get back land lost with the 1846-48 US war, thousands walking out of high schools to protest the racism, and many putting on Brown Berets to defend their communities. We joined the United Farm Workers as campesinas and boycott supporters. Thousands of us marched against the Vietnam war on August 29, 1970, only to be chased and struck down by tear-gassing police who also killed three Chicanos that day

The generation brought up during the Great Depression and the Second World War, still in measure steeped in the much-maligned Protestant work ethic, resolved to work hard and provide a more secure heritage for their children. And, in measure, they did. But the children, for whom the Depression and the War belonged to the relics of history, had nothing to live for but more “progress.” There was no grand vision, no taste of genuine want, and not much of the Protestant work ethic either.83 Soon the war in Vietnam became one of the central “causes” of that generation, but scarcely one that incited hard work, integrity in relationships, frugality, self-denial, and preparation for the next generation. That ’60s generation, the baby boomers, have now gone mainstream—but with a selfishness and consumerism that outstrips anything their parents displayed. There is no larger vision. Contrast a genuine Christian vision that lives life with integrity now because this life is never seen as more than the portal to the life to come, including perfect judgment from our Maker. At its best, such a stance, far from breeding withdrawal from the world, fosters industry, honest work for honest pay, frugality, generosity, provision for one’s children, honesty in personal relationships and in business relationships, the rule of law, a despising of greed. A “Protestant work ethic” of such a character I am happy to live with. Of course, a couple of generations later, when such a Christian vision has eroded, people may equate prosperity with God’s blessing, and with despicable religious cant protest that they are preparing for eternity when in their heart of hearts they are merely preparing for retirement. But a generation or two after that their children will expose their empty fatuousness. In any case, what has been lost is a genuinely Christian vision. This is not to say that such a vision will ensure prosperity. When it is a minority vision it may ensure nothing more than persecution. In any case, other unifying visions may bring about prosperity as well, as we have seen. From the perspective of the Bible, prosperity is never the ultimate goal, so that is scarcely troubling. What is troubling is a measuring stick in which the only scale is measured in terms of financial units.

One must ask why government is so reluctant to publish factual data on children in its care.  Unlike the single issue anti-Vietnam War protesters of the 1960s, the more recent “Occupy Wall Street” protesters on the streets and on college campuses nationwide have been protesting not only the larger issue of "corporate greed" and the "buying of Congress," but also resulting issues of a bleeding economy such as the rising cost of tuition, insurmountable student debt, biased economics classes and 15%  unemployment. There has never  been mass protesting  against profits outweighing the needs of the children and adults trapped in America’s failed Foster Care, Adoption and Prison systems  --  in part because each of these complex industries separate, isolate  and effectively censor and brainwash its victims under color of state confidentiality laws. 

Unlike Hirsi Ali, Ayers was not banned from college campuses; instead he was revered on them—another reason why my sit-down with him was perhaps the most compelling thing I’ve done on television. For decades, Ayers had been allowed to pass himself off as nothing more than a Vietnam War protester who set off a few explosive devices and no one got hurt. Nonsense. He terrorized people, including children. His group committed murder. Some academic types were so determined to reward him for his opposition to the war that he was given a relative pass for years. But he did not get a pass on The Kelly File. Nor was he allowed to dodge and weave with his usual retorts of “No one was hurt.” Yes, they were. New

Ali’s stand against Vietnam made him a symbol of protest against a war in which black men were dying at a wildly disproportionate rate

reading the text copy. “Where three protestors against the launch of the armed American space mission to investigate the landing of the Visitor starship on Mars set themselves on fire. The identities of the dead have not yet been determined, but nothing of the sort has been seen since the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s.” “Jesus,” Lee murmured. “The tumult and chaos outside the houses of power in the Capitol were mirrored by the violence within the halls of the House of Representatives.” “Warmongering terrorists from this administration are going to drag us into a war!” Morales recognized the congressman screaming the accusation. He was from California because of course he was, a slender dagger of a man dressed in a suit that cost more than Morales made in a month, though he styled himself as a champion of the poor. “Not just with the Russians, but with advanced aliens who could destroy this entire planet!” Spittle flecked from his mouth as he clutched the microphone against the grip of the sergeant-at-arms who tried to pull him away, and the Speaker of the House slammed her gavel. “You

Obviously, the violence suppression of social movements is hardly new. One need only think of the Red Scare, the reaction to radical labor movements like the IWW, let alone the campaigns of outright assassination directed against the American Indian Movement or black radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s. But in almost every case, the victims were either working-class or nonwhite. On the few occasions where even much milder systematic repression is directed at any significant number of middle-class white people--as during the McCarthy era, or against student protesters during the Vietnam War--it quickly becomes a national scandal. And, while it would be wrong to call Occupy Wall Street a middle-class white people’s movement--it was much more divers than that--there is no doubt that very large numbers of middle-class white people were involved in it. Yet the government did not hesitate to attack it, often using highly militarized tactics, often deploying what can only be called terroristic violence--that is, if "terrorism" is defined as attacks on civilians consciously calculated to create terror for political ends. (I know this statement might seem controversial. But when Los Angeles police, for example, open fire with rubber bullets on a group of chalk-wielding protesters engaged in a perfectly legal, permitted "art walk," in an obvious attempt to teach citizens that participating in any Occupy-related activity could lead to physical injury, it’s hard to see how that word should not apply.) (p. 141-142)