Viet Nam and the 60s Revisited

            In the July/Aug issue of The American Prospect, the lead editorial, by Paul Starr, notes that this is the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Michael Harrington’s The Other America.  This was the book which raised awareness about poverty in America and can be considered the opening shot in the war on poverty. The year 1962 can also be seen as the beginning of the final push to pass a civil rights law and the beginning of what would be called “the protest generation.” Paul Starr’s article, “The Sixties at Fifty,” looks back at the 60s with a half century of hindsight to see what went right, what went wrong, and what lessons  might be learned.

            The first goal of the 60s activists had been to help get a civil rights law passed-- and in this they succeeded. But no sooner than the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, the Viet Nam War, or at least, major American involvement in that war, began.  The protest generation then became the anti-war protest generation, and its main struggle, a struggle which nearly ripped this country apart, was to end the war.   And in this, they also succeeded.  It took a while to end this war, and before it was over, more than 50,000 young Americans had died in a lost cause which, toward the end, almost no one believed in. But the activists eventually succeeded and the war ended.  The activists also demanded an end to the draft, and in 1973 they got it, though the jury is still out on whether this was a good idea.

             But as for the broader goals of the 60s activist generation, goals involving a major power shift from the owners of this country to the people, they failed abjectly.   The most amazing thing, looking back, is how much we all took for granted.  By the end of the 60s, we had experienced a 25 year boom, and the distribution of wealth and income had been gradually becoming more equal ever since Roosevelt.  And everyone just assumed that this situation would continue indefinitely. By then, even Republicans had accepted the New Deal, and we all assumed that the only point of contention would be whether any additional redistribution of wealth would happen quickly or very slowly.  But getting agreement about how big a slice of the pie everyone should get is much easier when the pie is growing.

            But in the 70s growth slowed down.  Fighting the Viet Nam War without raising taxes to pay for it had nearly wrecked the economy, and when the price of oil quadrupled in 1973, we had runaway inflation.  The Dollar lost 75% of its buying power in less than a decade. Every interest group in the country jockeyed for position, desperately trying to maintain their own economic status, ostensibly at the expense of everyone else’s status.  Early on, the billionaires realized that there would be no way for the rich to continue getting richer unless everyone else got poorer.  So from ’73 on, the billionaires have waged unceasing war on working people in general and on organized labor in particular. Although productivity has continued to increase after 1973, real wages, after inflation, have been stagnant or falling since then, the distribution of wealth is nearly where it was in the 1890s, and only 7% of the private sector is still unionized.

            Yet in the late 60s, we had more liberal boots on the ground, and more people passionately committed to progressive change than at any time since the Civil War.    So how could we have lost?             We lost because the two main engines of social change, the unions and the activists, were not working in concert—in fact, they weren’t even on speaking terms. The student/hippie/activist/protest  groups never understood that, in the real world,  transferring power to working people would have to involve the cooperation of organized labor. 

And organized labor, from the international presidents to the rank and file hard hats, did not grasp that these street protestors were the only effective political force that might be on their side.  Not only did these two groups not trust each other, they each saw the other as the enemy.

            I saw this from both sides.  I had attended college in the late 50s for a couple years before I was drafted.  (Actually, I enlisted to avoid being drafted.)   After I got out of the Army, I became a construction electrician.  So in the late 60s, I had a foot in both camps.  Half of my friends were student activists, and the other half were hard hat construction workers.  I spent five or six years trying to convince each group that the other could be trusted. 

            The main issue was the Viet Nam War.  By the late 60s, the activists felt that the war was destroying the country and had to be stopped.  The blue collar workers still supported the war-- and believed that the activists were destroying the country. You may ask, “How could the hard hats have been so naïve?”   But remember, you are viewing this with 45 years of hindsight.  In the beginning, the entire country supported the war.    When the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the Senate in ’64, it did so with only two dissenting votes—Ernest Gruening of Alaska, and Wayne Morse of Oregon.  And the people who were the architects of our involvement in that war were Kennedy’s own, handpicked cabinet—the best and the brightest—the Harvard educated geniuses. 

            But the Kennedy cabinet all suffered from one fatal flaw:  They were all WWII survivors. They remembered Hitler, and saw every nationalist movement through the same lens.  They knew that if we had squashed Hitler like an insect, which we could easily have done in 1932, then we might have prevented WWII.  So every trouble maker was seen as a potential Hitler. The only high level administration members who did not see Vietnam in this way were Under-secretary of State George Ball and Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith.  Galbraith eventually resigned over Viet Nam, and published the book, Viet Nam, the War We Cannot Win, Should Not Wish to Win—and are Not Winning.”  But the advice of these two lone dissenters was ignored.

            So, if the President’s cabinet fell for the Viet Nam trap, how could a mob of student hippies grasp the issue, when many of them were too incompetent to find their way out of a phone booth?   The reason is that they had access to better information.  At the time that the war began, the State Department had only a handful of people who could speak Vietnamese, and all of them were probably recruited through our friends in Saigon.  These people, as agents of the Saigon Government, would have told us only what the Saigon government wanted us to hear.  And no one in the government was an expert on Asian history.  The only independent scholarship on this subject was to be found on college campuses.  The various professors of Asian history were all alarmed as soon as they saw that the U.S. was about to commit troops to try to save the Saigon regime. But who listens to professors of Asian Studies?   Not the government, unfortunately.  But students do listen to professors, and this particular mass of students had good reason to pay attention. They knew that they would all eventually be drafted-- and might easily be killed or wounded in this war.  So they had an urgent interest in finding out whether this war was actually in America’s interest and whether it was winnable.  And the answer, from those who had spent their whole lives studying Asia, was an emphatic no to both questions.  Word passed from student to student, and soon every college student in the country knew something that the government did not know.

 Every generation of college students believes that it knows more than their parents.  Well, this is a generation who actually did—but no one listened, at least, not at first.

            During the late 60s, the blue collar working class still supported the war, not because they were stupid, but because they did not have access to the same information that the students had.  And one must remember that the mainstream media were not neutral on this issue.  Every night, some network news show would have interviews with Secretary of State Dean Rusk or one of his underlings, in which these government spokesmen would be given as much air time as they wanted to explain, in exquisite detail, why the Viet Nam war was both necessary and winnable, and why the Viet Cong were a threat to free peoples everywhere. Of course, after the first few years of the war, they knew that what they were saying was nonsense.  But by then, we were so deeply committed in Viet Nam that there was no way out. After thousands of American soldiers had died, how could we just leave? So the Administration just doubled down, sent in more and more troops, and hoped for some kind of miracle. But the miracle never came.

            But during all this time, did the networks ever give equal time to the anti-war faction?  No; they just showed footage of throngs of students waving signs and screaming, “Hell no!  We won’t go!”   At no point, in the early years, did any news program invite the anti-war protestors into the studio to calmly explain the reasons for their opposition.  The anti-war faction had all the facts on their side--arguments that most people would have found overwhelming if they had been exposed to them.  But these views were not aired on TV.  They could be found only in obscure left wing print journals which nobody reads.

            Eventually, the mainstream media realized that they were being manipulated.  Walter Cronkite, a CBS news anchor was the first to turn against the war.  And when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, (which proved that the U.S. had deliberately provoked the “Gulf of Tokin Incident” to obtain an excuse to enter an Asian civil war) the New York Times published them.  Congress began holding hearings in which all sides were asked to testify. John Kerry, a Viet Nam vet who had become an anti-war spokesman testified:  He asked, since we know that we will have to abandon Viet Nam sooner or later, why don’t we do it now, before more people die?  He asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last American to die in Viet Nam?” In 1973, Congress cut off funding for the war, and we withdrew from Viet Nam. But though the war ended, the bitter rift which it caused continues to this day.

            Starr claims that because organized labor and the student activists split over the Viet Nam war, they were unable to cooperate on several other issues that they might otherwise have agreed on. I certainly agree. The low point in relations came in 1968, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.   An anti-war candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, had amassed a number of delegates, but there was a dispute over who would be seated and who would be allowed to speak.  Basically, the convention was fixed, and the anti-war faction got screwed.  A demonstration broke out on the streets and Mayor Daley’s regime organized a “counter demonstration” and on the evening news, we saw footage of hard hat construction workers beating students over the head with clubs.  The day after, some of my hard hat friends, who seemed very pleased with this event, asked me what I thought of it.   I replied, “What you have just seen may be the end or organized labor in America.”   They recoiled in horror and asked, “But why?  How could beating up a bunch of commie hippie scum make a difference?”

 I asked, “Do you know who those people are?  That “commie, hippie scum” is probably the future top leadership of this country.”  I said, “There is an old saying: ‘Be careful whose toes you step on--they may be connected to an ass you might have to kiss someday’.”     I explained that all of these hippies were students. And in a country where higher education is rationed to those families who can pay for it, that means that they all come from solidly middle class families.   And when they dropped out of college to protest the war, many of them were at the top of their class.  Someday the war will be over, and they will all return to college and complete their degrees.   Kittens grow up to be cats, and law students grow up to be lawyers, judges, and congressmen. Engineering students grow up to be CEOs of high tech companies that dominate the economy.  Economics students grow up to be Wall Street titans.   “In fact,” I said, “nearly all of the people of our generation who will be in influential positions 30 years from now are anti-war protestors today.  Someday, organized labor will need their help—but it isn’t going to be there, because of what just happened in Chicago.”

            Looking back, I may have over reacted to the Chicago disaster.  But the split between anti-war activists, labor, and the Democratic Party was real--and had consequences that haunt us even today.