A People’s History of the United States: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

Between 1964 and 1972, the U.S. spent billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives to fight a nationalist group in a “tiny, peasant country”—and failed. Following World War Two, the French continued to control colonies in Indochina (a region of Southeast Asia). By the late 1940s, a full-scale nationalist revolution was building in Indochina. Peasants and farmers, organized by a Communist named Ho Chi Minh, demanded their rights to self-determination, citing the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. To quell the revolution, the French bombed Northern Vietnamese cities.

From 1946 to 1954, America funded the vast majority of the French war effort, providing advice, guns, and money. Why? Publicly, the government claimed that it was trying to prevent the spread of Communism in Asia. However, secret government memos also cited the importance of Southeast Asia’s natural resources as reasons for ensuring that Vietnam remain under the control of a Western, capitalist power. The American government, cooperating with the existing French leadership, installed an official named Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam; however, Diem’s regime was unpopular, since he did very little to address widespread poverty. By contrast, Ho Chi Minh aimed to remedy poverty among his people. It is likely that the U.S., disappointed with Diem’s performance, conspired with South Vietnamese generals to assassinate Diem.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson, citing a “murky set of events in the Gulf of Tonkin,” began a war in Vietnam. (It later turned out that there had been no “open aggression” against Americans in the Gulf of Tonkin, contrary to Johnson’s claims.) Johnson deployed troops to Vietnam without asking for Congressional approval, as the Constitution requires. Despite petitions to declare the war unconstitutional, the Supreme Court did not consider the issue.

The Vietnam War was brutal for the Vietnamese people; American troops treated them cruelly. In one of the most notorious episodes of the war, the 1968 My Lai massacre, American troops methodically murdered women, children, and the elderly. Later, the army tried and failed to cover up the incident. In the end, some officers involved in My Lai were tried, but only one officer was convicted, and he only served a three-year sentence. Zinn writes, “My Lai was unique only in its details”—across Vietnam, there were hundreds of other comparable incidents. Moreover, American generals fully supported the bombing of Vietnam’s civilian population.

By 1968, it was widely accepted that the Vietnam War couldn’t be won. Richard Nixon campaigned for president on the promise that he’d end Vietnam. Over the course of the next four years, Nixon withdrew troops; however, he continued the military’s policies of bombing the civilian population of Vietnam. This meant that he didn’t “end” the war, but only the most unpopular aspect of it (the involvement of American soldiers).

Some of the earliest opposition to the Vietnam War in the U.S. came from the Civil Rights Movement. As early as 1966, SNCC’s official position on Vietnam was that the U.S. was violating international law there. Influential black leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr., criticized the war effort for sending black people to die for a cause that had no relevance to their lives. Across the country, tens of thousands of young people refused to register for the draft and were jailed for their actions. Influential actors, musicians, and writers used their fame to speak out against Vietnam. Daniel Ellsberg, an employee of the RAND Corporation (a group that did secret research for the government) leaked thousands of pages of secret documents about the government’s role in the Vietnam War, documents collectively known as the Pentagon Papers.

Students were particularly active in opposing Vietnam. Although the press’s coverage of student demonstrations against Vietnam gave the impression that opposition to the war was mostly limited to middle-class students, statistics show strong antiwar sentiment in the working classes as well. Indeed, some surveys suggested that people with less money and education were more likely to oppose the war than people with significant money and education. Instead of publicizing these statistics, the media suggested that blue-collar Americans were enthusiastic war supporters. Soldiers and veterans were among the most enthusiastic opponents of the Vietnam War. GIs, many of them low-income, formed groups like the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). One influential veteran, Ron Kovic, was confined to a wheelchair after his service in Vietnam, and he experienced the squalid conditions of veterans’ hospitals. As a member of VVAW, he spoke out against the war.

The history of the Vietnam War suggests that Americans succeeded in pressuring the government to end the war. In the Pentagon Papers, it is clear that “public opinion” was a key factor in the government’s decision-making with Vietnam. Especially in the late days of the Lyndon Johnson administration, the government deescalated the bombing campaign in response to demonstrations. Although Richard Nixon claimed that he wouldn’t be influenced by protests, it’s clear in his own memoirs that he was—a rare “admission of the power of public protest.”