The Longest War was Vietnam

 Vietnam was the First of the so-called "Longest Wars"

The Vietnam War was the first modern American conflict that seriously divided the United States. Expansion of the war coincided with significant social challenges related to the conformist 1950s and early 1960s as well as the constant reminders of Cold War fears. These challenges included various movements, formed to address social inequality and the lack of universal justice. Vietnam veterans returning home found no parades welcoming them back to the United States. Rather, they witnessed a disturbed and highly polarized society.

 

United States Involvement in Southeast Asia

 

The so-called “twenty-five year war” began after World War II ended. French attempts to maintain her pre-war colonial possessions depended upon American support. After Vietnam was divided during the Eisenhower administration, the United States spent $1 billion up to 1960 in propping up the unpopular South Vietnamese government.

 

During the brief Kennedy administration, the United States was drawn further into the quagmire that would eventually see half a million Americans fighting to stop Communism. Vietnam was viewed as the first important test of the Domino Theory. Additionally, both major political parties wanted to be seen as strong in confronting Communism.

 

John F. Kennedy’s administration began with the Bay of Pigs debacle. He could only watch as Nikita Khrushchev ordered the construction of the Berlin Wall. The Cuban Missile Crisis represented the ultimate example of brinkmanship while alienating key European allies like France. Confronting Communism became the paramount foreign policy issue.

 

Lyndon B. Johnson Increased American Military Action in Vietnam

 

The escalation of war following the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident necessitated the drafting of tens of thousands. Until the lottery system was instituted under President Nixon, the men shipped to Vietnam reflected high numbers of minorities and high-school drop outs. According to historians William Wheeler and Susan Becker, “only 12 percent of the college graduates between 1964 and 1973 served in Vietnam.”

 

It was not uncommon, for example, to have the local “beat cop” in many cities referring names of delinquent teens to draft boards. Some men enlisted, seeing the military as a viable option when a college education was not possible. This was especially true for minorities and poor Americans. Privileged Americans who did poorly in college joined state National Guard units to avoid service. Some “draft dodgers” fled to Canada.

 

The Draft System and Anti-War Youth Protest

 

The draft system prior to the lottery deferred college students. As changes were made, students were required to maintain good grades or risk losing their deferred status. Graduate students attending medical schools and seminaries were also exempt until the completion of their academic programs.

 

Universities were already centers of student discontent and in the late 1960s there was a cause for everyone. The Civil Rights movement led to President Johnson’s focus on key legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act. A growing women’s movement, headed by feminists like Betty Friedan, challenged the 1950s domestic role of American women.

 

Dissatisfaction with conformity and what American youth viewed as shallow materialism was expressed in popular music and would later coalesce into anti-war rock music. Woodstock, in August 1969, represented the epitome of youth frustration. Woodstock was both a celebration of life as perceived by youth as well as a protest against the status quo.

 

The step from social protest to anti-war protest was very small. Messages like “give peace a chance” or rallies where students burned draft cards and U.S. flags attested to the strong desire for real social change. To this day, John Lennon’s “Imagine” is sung every New Year’s Eve in Times Square, New York in the minutes before the New Year begins.

 

Conservative Americans Class with Anti-War Americans

 

An oral history by a young protestor, who later worked with returning Vietnam veterans, talks about a math teacher in her high school who disappeared from the rural Wisconsin community. The teacher had obtained a conscientious objector draft status and, according to the speaker, “In my town, that wasn’t much different from being a Communist.”

 

Some Americans believed that protests were being secretly assisted by Communist agents. George Tieland and his wife Annie had been active members in the American Communist Party in the 1950s, displaying a portrait of Josef Stalin in their Queens, New York soda shop.

 

Tieland, referring to anti-war activities, claimed that the KGB had trained key students as well as their own agents to ferment anti-war protests on college campuses. He claimed to have knowledge of this from contacts he still maintained with old party colleagues. Tieland had trained in a Communist academy near Moscow after World War I, before coming to America and was the brother of Albert Walter, a leading German Communist before Hitler took power.

 

Conservative Americans used such stories as well as the more violent protests to legitimize their own views that Communism was already at the American doorstep. Colleges were viewed as liberal institutions, staffed by Communist sympathizing professors. The phrase, “America: love it or leave it” became increasingly popular.

 

Vietnam Divides American Society

 

Returning war veterans were caught between angry protests and a war-weary society that justified the war but wanted it to end. Richard Nixon’s resignation in light of the Watergate scandal increased national apathy. Vietnam demonstrated that Communism would not be defeated by bombs, Agent Orange, napalm, or the threat of nuclear warfare. It also left a society that doubted the efficacy of its institutions.

 

Sources:

 

Stephen E. Ambrose and Douglas G. Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (Penguin Books, 1997)

George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam 1950-1975 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)

Senator Eugene McCarthy, The Limits of Power: America’s Role in the World (Dell, 1968)

General Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam (University Press of Kentucky, 1984)

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