Vietnam War Changed a Traumatized America

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

At the beginning of 1967, the U.S. State Department announced that 5,008 Americans had been killed in Vietnam in 1966, fueling nationwide protests. But President Lyndon Johnson saw America’s credibility on the line and determined to press on.

The president had escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965 with broad but very shallow popular support. By the summer of 1967, the United States had 448,800 troops in Vietnam, draft calls exceeded 30,000 a month and some 13,000 Americans had been killed.

Yet the people in government, so sure they were, as the title of the 1972 book by David Halberstam indicates, “the best and the brightest,” refused to take heed.

Robert McNamara, a president of Ford Motor Company who became secretary of defence, “knew nothing about Asia, about poverty, about people, about American domestic politics,” wrote Halberstam.

The war had become a bloody stalemate and opposition to this senseless conflict was gathering steam.

At the start of that year, Muhammad Ali, perhaps the most prominent athlete in the world, fought induction into the U.S. Army on religious grounds and condemned the war. The antiwar movement was growing and now attracted highly visible new supporters like Martin Luther King Jr.

And even television – which in the U.S. at the time was basically limited to three major networks – finally began to take notice.

When “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” made its premiere on CBS Feb. 5, 1967, and grew in popularity, it demonstrated that mainstream American has begun to question the war.

Tom and Dick Smothers, until then two fairly unknown comedians and folk singers, began to challenge Johnson’s administration and its rationale for continuing the conflict.

The brothers even got CBS to break the 17-year-old network TV blacklisting of folk singer Pete Seeger, who had been a supporter of the Soviet Union, on Sept. 10, 1967.

The war became ever more destructive and American casualties kept increasing. Much of the American intelligentsia and literary community now opposed the conflict.

At the beginning of 1968, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Baez, Susan Sontag, Thomas Pynchon and James Baldwin joined more than 400 others in signing the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war.

For most other Americans, realization that it could not be won came with the Tet offensive.

On Jan. 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam.

General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam, planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the U.S. to scale back its support of the Saigon regime.

Though American and South Vietnamese forces managed to hold off the Communist attacks, news coverage of the offensive (including the lengthy Battle of Huế) shocked and dismayed the American public and further eroded support for the war effort.

The attacks marked a turning point in the Vietnam War and the beginning of the slow American withdrawal.

On March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election. That November, his vice-president Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate in the presidential election, lost to Republican Richard Nixon, who promised to end the war – though it would drag on for another seven years.

Meanwhile, on April 4, 1969 CBS fired the Smothers brothers, whose show had become ever more “radical.” In a very small way, I know how they felt.

In 1967-68 I was an MA student political science at McGill University in Montreal, and one of a number of teaching assistants in the Introduction to Political Science course.

Following Johnson’s resignation, I told the professor teaching the course that “the ruling class” had “fired” Johnson. She was so angry that she fired me!

Maybe my statement smacked of hyperbole, but I still think that, in a sense, I was right.
Today, one would find few defenders of that war.