The official propagandists cooked up various formulas to justify their military intervention. It was depicted as a crusade for democracy and freedom against the threat of communist totalitarianism and for the defense of the independence of the South against invasion from the North. The U.S. was there, it was said, to fulfill treaty obligations to the client Saigon regime and thwart the expansionism of China and the Soviet Union. Toward the end the excuses became exceedingly thin: to assure the return of the POWs; to prevent a bloodbath in the South if the NLF should take over completely; to protect U.S. troops as they were withdrawn. All this was demagogy.

In reality, U.S. intervention had a thoroughly imperialistic character. The colossus of world capitalism hurled its military might without provocation against a small and divided colonial nation thousands of miles away struggling for self-determination and unification. A series of American presidents sought to do what King George III's empire failed to do against the rebel patriots of 1776.

On one side was a state armed to the teeth promoting the strategic aims and material interests of the corporate rich on the global arena; on the other was a worker and peasant uprising heading toward the overthrow of capitalist power and property, despite the limited political program of its leadership.

These underlying anticapitalist and antilandlord tendencies were eventually clearly expressed in the reunification of Vietnam in 1976 and the process of eliminating capitalist property relations in the South. The prolonged civil war in South Vietnam thereby proved to be an integral part of the international confrontation between the upholders of capitalism and the forces moving in a socialist direction that has been unfolding since the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution....

In the early sixties the vast majority of Americans ignored the war, or accommodated themselves to it, though without much patriotic fervor. It seemed remote from their immediate concerns, something which they knew little or nothing about and left trustingly to their government. That was still a time of confidence in the wisdom and honesty of the top political leaders and above all in the benevolent intentions of the occupants of the White House. The Washington policy makers took cruel advantage of this naiveté.

Without exaggeration, most Americans were hardly aware that Vietnam existed when the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy administrations were stealthily pulling them step by step into the bloody quagmire. The Democrats and Republicans jointly carried out the "bipartisan foreign policy" in Southeast Asia and rubber-stamped it in Congress while the major media that molded public opinion--and kept it uninformed--gave no warning of what was ahead.  
 
Emergence of antiwar movement
The antiwar movement began with people who were already radicalized: pacifists, socialists, communists, rebellious students, and a scattering of morally outraged individuals. At the start these were a small minority, convinced of the justness of their cause and ready to face unpopularity for their stand. The energy, resoluteness, and fortitude of this vanguard brought the movement into being and remained its prime mover.

The most paradoxical aspect of this profound and unforgettable chapter of American history was the central and decisive role played by the left-wing elements, which included the radical pacifists. When it began, it was almost unthinkable that they could set in motion and head a movement of such vast scope. They themselves did not really expect such a development. They just felt obliged to do whatever they could.

At the beginning of the sixties the American left--old and new--was looked upon as an esoteric fringe with virtually negligible influence. So far as numbers in radical organizations were concerned, this was close to the truth. The cold war and the witch-hunting atmosphere, in conjunction with the prolonged prosperity of the 1950s, had decimated their ranks. Even after their numbers increased manyfold during the sixties and early seventies, the tens of thousands directly supporting the various radical groupings were not very large compared to the entire population.

Yet this unrespectable, "irrelevant," and by no means homogeneous band became "the saving remnant" as it moved into the vacancy left by the established educational, religious, labor union, journalistic, and political institutions. These were tied in with the two-party system and went along with the generals and the State Department, supporting a perfectly obvious illegal and unjust war to one extent or another.

On closer examination this is not so surprising. For only those who were prepared ideologically to defy pervasive, blind conformity could take the risk of overt opposition. If the number of such Americans was so small in the early sixties, this testified less to the irrelevance of the radicals than to the marginal place that deepgoing criticism occupied under the profound corruption and advanced senility of the two-party system.

The movement later made its impact upon that system, as the proliferation of dove Democrats and Republicans showed. But the dove politicians didn't lead, they followed, far behind, stumbling and mumbling all the way. There has since been some deft distorting of the record on this point, but the attempted rehabilitation is belied by the facts.

Only two senators, Morse and Gruening, voted against the Tonkin Gulf resolution which gave Johnson the green light in 1964. A single member of the House, Adam Clayton Powell, registered some sort of dissent by abstaining. Others knew something was wrong. But they were also aware that to avoid "irrelevance" within the two-party system you don't go around offending the powers-that-be and challenging "reasons of state" on grounds of human decency or anything of that sort. Morse, Gruening, and Powell were all knifed by their national party leadership and never won another election. Even after the dramatic switch in the public attitude made dovishness permissible on Capitol Hill, the vast majority in both parties--doves included--consistently voted for the Vietnam military budget up to 1973.  
 
 
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