How did the Vietnam War divide the country and what was the outcome?

D.N.: How was Vietnam different from previous U.S. wars?

How did the Vietnam War divide the country and what was the outcome?

What does this image reveal about the conflict within the U.S. during the Vietnam War?

· As the fighting escalated, the U.S. relied on the draft for raising troops.

· By 1968, over half a million Americans were fighting in the Vietnam War.

•  “I am not going to the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went..”

•  LBJ

The Counterculture:

•  Sex, Drugs, and Rock n. Roll •  Summer of Love (1967)

– 20,000 in S.F. – “Turn on to the scene, tune in to what is

happening, and drop out..” Timothy Leary •  communes •  economic and sexual alternatives to

nuclear families •  400,000 people attended the 3-day

Woodstock Music and Art Fair 1969

August 15 to August 18, 1969

Counterculture of the 1960s Video Show to 1:33

•  As the Counterculture gathered momentum (Hippies, Flower Children, etc.), protests became widespread and began to polarize the nation

Anti-war Protest Video 1967

•  If time

•  Campus/Community Protests

•  Students for a Democratic Society (1962) –  40 students met in Port

Huron, Michigan –  grew to 100,000 members

on 300 colleges •  Stop the Draft Week (1967):

100,000 protestors •  170,000 became conscientious

objectors •  60,000 fled the country •  200,000 failed to register

•  As the war escalated, demonstrations and other forms of protest become commonplace on university campuses and in major cities of the U.S, including the October 1967 march on the Pentagon.

Anti-War Demonstrations

Columbia University 1967

•  Civil rights leaders and other critics, including the formidable Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., described the Vietnam conflict as racist—"a white man's war, a black man's fight." King maintained that black youths represented a disproportionate share of early draftees and that African Americans faced a much greater chance of seeing combat.

•  The draft did pose a major concern. Selective Service regulations offered deferments for college attendance and a variety of essential civilian occupations that favored middle- and upper- class whites. The vast majority of draftees were poor, undereducated, and urban—blue-collar workers or unemployed. This reality struck hard in the African American community.

The Vietnam War saw the highest proportion of blacks ever to serve in an American war. During the height of the U.S. involvement, 1965-69, blacks, who formed 11 percent of the American population, made up 12.6 percent of the soldiers in Vietnam. The majority of these were in the infantry, and although authorities differ on the figures, the percentage of black combat fatalities in that period was a staggering 14.9 percent, a proportion that subsequently declined. Volunteers and draftees included many frustrated blacks whose impatience with the war and the delays in racial progress in America led to race riots on a number of ships and military bases, beginning in 1968

Muhammad Ali Video • In 1967, three years after Ali had won the World Heavyweight Championship, he was publicly vilified for his refusal to be conscripted into the U.S. military, based on his religious beliefs and opposition to the Vietnam War. Ali stated, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong... No Viet Cong ever called me nigger”

•  Ali was eventually arrested and found guilty on draft evasion charges; he was stripped of his boxing title, and his boxing license was suspended. He was not imprisoned, but did not fight again for nearly four years while his appeal worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was eventually successful.

The Tet Offensive, January 1968 z  N. Vietnamese Army + Viet

Cong attack South simultaneously (67,000 attack 100 cities, bases, and the US embassy in Saigon)

z  Take every major southern city

z  U.S. + ARVN beat back the offensive

z  Viet Cong nearly destroyed z  N. Vietnamese army

debilitated z  BUT…

•  This audacious operation took America and its South Vietnamese allies entirely by surprise.

•  Not only did the attack violate the two-day truce both sides had pledged to observe around Tet – the Vietnamese Lunar New Year – but just a few weeks earlier, the commander of American military operations General Westmoreland had smugly declared the Communists were

•  “unable to mount a major offensive” and dared them to “try something, because we are looking for a fight.”

•  In the ensuing days, Americans turned on their televisions to find scenes of chaos and carnage. – and when Brigadier General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan raised his pistol, extended his arm and fired a bullet through the head of his Vietcong prisoner, NBC cameraman and photographer Eddie Adams captured the harrowing moment which was subsequently splashed across 50 million tv screens.

•  Americans could not believe what they were seeing.

http://www.history.com/shows/vietnam-in-hd/videos/tet-offensive#tet-offensive

Tet Offensive (4:53) This massive North Vietnamese surprise attack during the 1968 Tet holiday was a crucial turning point in the war.

•  As the TET offensive continued into February, the anchorman for the CBS evening news, Walter Cronkite, traveled to Vietnam and filed several reports.

•  Upon his return, Cronkite took an unprecedented step of presenting his "editorial opinion" at the end of the news broadcast on February 27th. "For it seems now more certain than ever," Cronkite said, "that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate."

•  After watching Cronkite's broadcast, LBJ was quoted as saying. "That's it. If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost middle America."

The My Lai Massacre •  A serious blow to U.S. credibility came with the

exposure of the My Lai massacre (March 1968). •  Hushed up at the time and only discovered by a

tenacious journalist, this involved the killing of 400 men, women and children by US troops.

Democratic Convention in Chicago, 1968

Student Protestors at Univ. of CA

in Berkeley, 1968

Anti-War Demonstrations

•  By the late 1960s, the SDS had splintered, with one of the most notable of its resultant movements being the Weather Underground, which repudiated non-violence and supported violent action as a necessary means to destroy capitalism and, in their opinion, the oppression that arose from such a system.

•  Included here are two photographs from one of the first Weather Underground protests, the "Days of Rage" in Chicago which led to over 70 arrests. October 1969

Hard Core War Protest Video

http://americanhistory.unomaha.edu/module_files/Peace%20March.mpeg

•  increasingly the American people came to perceive the “Credibility Gap”, i.e. they no longer believed that LBJ was telling them the truth about events in the war

§  in 1968, LBJ chose not to run for president, and Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected on a platform of “Peace with Honour”

z  Hey, Hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?

http://www.history.com/shows/classroom/videos#Vietnam-in-HD-Classroom-Preview

Vietnam in HD Classroom Preview (5:26) Watch a short preview of Vietnam in HD, a gripping portrait of the war told through the stories of those who experienced it firsthand

Protests continued…

Protests at Home · Thousands of Americans protested against the war, especially on college campuses.

Anti-Vietnam War protests, Ohio State University

· On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed 4 anti-war protesters at Kent State University.

This Pulitzer Prize winning photo shows Mary Ann Vecchio screaming as she kneels over the body of student Jeffrey Miller at Kent State University. National Guardsmen had fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing four and wounding nine.

“Ohio” Crosby Stills Nash & Young

Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin'. Four dead in Ohio. (chorus) Gotta get down to it. Soldiers are cutting us down. Should have been done long ago. What if you knew her and Found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know? Play song from iLike.com

Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na. (chorus) Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'. We're finally on our own. This summer I hear the drummin'. Four dead in Ohio. (9X)

This Pulitzer Prize winning photograph is of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, center, running down a road near after a napalm bomb was dropped on her village by a plane of the Vietnam Air Force. The village was suspected by US Army forces of being a Viet Cong stronghold. Kim Phuc survived by tearing off her burning clothes.

June 8, 1972