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anti-war
How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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The Vietnam War Ended 50 Years Ago. People Still Get It Wrong.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Apr 30, 2025
April 30th marks the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War's end when Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The war was a terrible experience for the United States, but even more so for the people of Vietnam and much of the rest of Southeast Asia. Estimates are that up to 3 million Vietnamese perished, as well many many thousands of Cambodians and Laotians. Fifty-eight thousand American died, and a trillion American tax dollars were wasted.
Many of us who were there are still trying to understand and come to grips with it. Based on years of study, here is what I think people still get wrong about the war. What I write will be controversial, but it is based on what I saw and learned. If I seem angry, it is because I still am.
In nearly all wars, the other side is demonized and made into evil caricatures of human beings; doing so makes it easier to kill them. From the U.S. perspective, the Vietnam War was no exception. Even the Vietnamese who were supposedly on our side were commonly referred to as gooks, zips (Zero Intelligence Personnel), slants, slopes and more, often to their faces. In my experience, the U.S. military chain of command made no effort to correct this. Given the pervasive racism among American troops, it should come as no surprise that violence against Vietnamese civilians was common. It is hard to understand how anyone thought the Vietnamese people would rally to the U.S. side while being badly treated.
The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
In Vietnam many of us learned to be quite skeptical of the media and the U.S. government. To cite just one example out of hundreds, as the advancing NVA/VC forces began to overrun the South (mid-1970's), U.S. officials and media warned of a bloodbath to come. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger warned that 200,000 would be killed if the communists won. The American armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, in one of the last issues to arrive in Saigon, carried a headline: "At Least a Million Vietnamese Will Be Slaughtered." But that never happened. When it came to allegations of massacres, whether by the enemy in Hue during Tet, or the Americans at My Lai, the truth was regularly mangled by the U.S. government and media.
The leak of the Pentagon Papers, which so infuriated then-President Richard Nixon, revealed many other falsehoods, even as to when the war started. The Papers show that it was in 1945 that the French government decided to reclaim its Vietnam colony from the Japanese occupiers. Then the U.S. got involved under President Harry Truman. From that time the U.S. provided air transport, weapons, advisers, and funding without which the French reoccupation would not have been possible. So the Vietnamese are correct in calling it the Ten Thousand Day War—the 30 years from 1945 to 1975.
The Pentagon Papers also reveal that U.S. leaders all the way from Truman to Nixon and Gerald Ford were advised that the U.S. could not win the war. They all knew that defeat was on the horizon, or perhaps just over the horizon. But except for Ford, all the presidents decided that, while the war was a lost cause, it would not be lost on their watch—so they kept it going by kicking the can down the road to the next president. So the death and destruction continued.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran for president declaring that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. In actuality, his secret was to covertly sabotage ongoing peace talks to prolong the war. It went on for four more years, and another 25,000 U.S. soldiers died in a war Nixon knew could not be won.
During and after the war we learned a good deal about war-related post traumatic stress. Tens of thousands of returning Vietnam veterans began showing alarming signs of acute mental distress, often leading to harming others or themselves. Thanks to cutting edge research by Veterans Affairs, we learned that troops serving in support roles (which is most of them) had rates of PTSD about the same as the general population, around 6%. On the other hand, troops who were involved in abusing civilians or prisoners had rates of PTSD of over 50%. There are treatments available, but none seem to be especially effective. The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
Today, most Americans think of the anti-war movement as mostly long-haired, pot-smoking hippies—with a Doctor Spock or a Jane Fonda occasionally thrown in. But that was not the reality. Instead, by 1967 thousands of veterans who had served in Vietnam returned home and eagerly joined the anti-war movement, especially on college campuses, quickly taking leadership positions. Tom Grace, in his book on the Kent State shootings, carefully documents that the leadership of the campus protesters there was almost entirely made up of returned working class veterans. This was typical. The largest of the veteran anti-war groups was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War with 20,000 to 50,000 members at its height. They were active in colleges and universities across the country.
There were also protests and some sabotage from within the active duty forces. In the face of widespread refusals to obey, ships could not put to sea, and aircraft could not fly. Racial tensions ran high.
Even with a half million troops in Vietnam, the U.S. could not prevail against a rising tide of nationalism in Vietnam, or even control most of the country. As the Pentagon Papers explained, the U.S. never had a chance.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Anger alone solves little. If you want peace, you will have to organize to get it.
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Pope Francis’ Legacy of Love and Peace
He spoke out against war, militarism, and the ravages of climate change.
Apr 24, 2025
In 2022, Pope Francis created a will expressing his desire that just one word be inscribed on the stone marking his burial place: Franciscus.
Franciscus, Latin for Francis, is the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose when, 12 years ago, cardinals elected him to become the Bishop of Rome. He sought union with Saint Francis, known as one who lived on the margins, who discarded his worldly clothes, and who kissed the lepers. Pope Francis longed for “a church that is poor and is for the poor.” He recognized, as Bishop Robert McElroy once expressed it, that “too much money is in the hands of too few, while the vast majority struggle to get by.”
As the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Pope Francis unified people of different generations. He encouraged genuine love for humans—“Todo, todo, todo.” Or, as the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal physician, the late beloved Chicagoan Dr. Quentin Young would often say, “Everybody in, nobody out.”
“Why,” he asked, “would anyone give weapons to people who use them for war?... The answer is money, and the money is drenched in blood.”
Pope Francis exhorted people to set aside the futility of war and to always care for those who bear the worst brunt of war, particularly the children. His were the words of a man whose heart aches for children who are being punished to death, sacrificed by powerful people whose lust for greed and power overcomes their capacity for compassion.
“Yesterday, children were bombed,” Pope Francis said in his final Christmas message last December. “Children. This is cruelty, this is not war.” He added, touching the cross he wore around his neck, “I want to say this, because it touches my heart.”
Pope Francis was speaking about the children of Gaza, who have been orphaned, maimed, sickened, starved, forcibly displaced, traumatized, and buried under fire and rubble. In excerpts from the book Hope Never Disappoints. Pilgrims Toward a Better World, published in November 2024, he was blunt about Israel’s accountability, writing: “What is happening in Gaza has the characteristics of a genocide. It should be investigated to determine whether it meets the definition formulated by jurists and international bodies.”
On Easter, the day before his death, Pope Francis expressed in a written message: “I appeal to the warring parties: Call a cease-fire, release the hostages, and come to the aid of a starving people that aspire to a future of peace!”
During the current war, beginning in 2023, Pope Francis developed a strong relationship with parishioners of the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza. By holding virtual gatherings with the hundreds of people sheltering in the church, he was able to stay in daily touch with the realities they faced under Israel’s siege and bombardment. On days when he learned that the bombing was particularly heavy, Pope Francis would call to check in on them as many as five times a day.
Pope Francis carried his anti-war message to the seats of power in places around the world. In September 2015, exasperated by the superpowers’ desire to control others through militarism, he posed a simple question to the U.S. Congress: “Why,” he asked, “would anyone give weapons to people who use them for war?... The answer is money, and the money is drenched in blood.”
Pope Francis emphasized the stewardship so vitally needed for future generations to have a habitable planet, sounding an alarm about the need to address climate change. “The world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” he stated in a magisterial document released in October 2023. “Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over, or relativise the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident.”
The Pontiff likewise denounced the use of atomic energy for the purposes of war, and declared possession of nuclear weapons to be immoral, asking, “How can we speak of peace even as we build terrifying new weapons of war?”
In accordance with his wishes, Pope Francis will be buried in a basilica dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a place he went to pray before and after each of his 47 “apostolic missions.” The Basilica of Saint Mary Major is located in one of Rome’s poorer neighborhoods, a church in a neighborhood with refugees. Francis has entrusted himself to the protection of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
I’d like to think that those words, “Todo, todo, todo,” will break down the barriers creating illusory divisions between us, leading us toward true egalitarianism, embracing Earth and one another, grateful always for the chance to “choose life, so that you and your descendants can live.”
Beloved Franciscus, “Oremus.” Let us pray.
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