by Theodore Douglas

Created on: June 30, 2009   Last Updated: July 01, 2009

Part of the problem when looking back at youthful protest in the 1960s is that it tends to be labeled the "anti-Vietnam" student movement, which ignores the point that those who took to the streets were angry about far more than the war in Vietnam, but its underlying causes.

The movement did get the attention of the public and the Johnson administration. Once the teach-ins, where college professors discussed the war and its underlying causes with students, began in 1965, President Johnson sent out advisers to attack their arguments. While much of the public bought the administration's counterarguments, others questioned the lack of passion for free debate coming from the government.

As the student protest movement gained steam, news coverage often treated them as spoiled kids who were either too young or foolish to understand world affairs. Their fundamental concerns about the war - and the inequalities in American society - were therefore dismissed. When antiwar protesters surrounded the Pentagon in 1967, they were attacked as misguided or simply out for a fight, regardless of those who placed flowers into the gun barrels of the soldiers there, hardly a sign of wickedness.

One of the most persuasive arguments made by the anti-Vietnam student movement was in Chicago in 1968 by showing how the US was, like Vietnam, starting to look somewhat like a police state. The specific claims of protesters about the war were drowned in the tumult however, as many Americans concluded only that the young were filled with an irrational hatred towards the world and needed to be stopped. The Tet Offensive a few months earlier had done more to validate wider concerns about Vietnam. They centered more on the ability and will of the nation to win the war, not the morality of intervention in a civil war or forcing alien ideologies onto a foreign land.

Between Chicago '68 and the shooting of four students at Kent State in Ohio in May 1970, the anti-Vietnam movement, as more and more of the public turned against the war, took on a more adult feel. As its age increased, the movement gained credibility with the media, as well as the government, which saw many a voter in the protesting throngs appearing across the nation. The student anti-Vietnam movement had created a framework that had, in conjunction with their generational superiors, made it possible to organize large-scale antiwar protests now that a large segment of the public decided that it too was disgusted with the war by 1969.

As this generational changing of the guard took place, in the anti-Vietnam movement, students were most visible only when protests became violent (thanks to more than a little help from the Nixon administration) or on campus, where some of the wider concerns about the war, like its association with imperialism, had not been forgotten. Ultimately, the anti-Vietnam student movement did help end the war; but it is often given too much credit for pushing the public and government to pull out of Vietnam. It was not until a large, older voting bloc (18 year olds could not vote until 1972) and a number of prominent politicians, such as Senator William Fulbright and later Bobby and Ted Kennedy came to publicly question the war that very real steps were finally taken to pull American forces out of the ground war.

Perhaps the most tragic consequence of the movement was that, while American lives were being saved as ground troops were pulled out of Vietnam, the consequent expansion of the air war led to an increased number of Vietnamese deaths, which was hardly what the anti-Vietnam student movement sought to accomplish.

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