Forma de aplicación

On evening of May 26, 1966, Stephen Smale of the Vietnam Day Committee rose to speak at the “Six Heures pour le Vietnam,” a colossal teach-in organized by French antiwar radicals. Smale’s friend Laurent Schwartz, the event’s primary organizer, hoped the presence of an American radical at Paris’ most spectacular antiwar action yet could deepen the feeling of international solidarity beginning to emerge around the Vietnam War. After briefly surveying the state of the American antiwar movement, Smale insisted on the importance of united action.

“People in France have asked me if there is any point in Frenchmen getting involved in the Vietnam protest,” Smale said.³⁹ “I tell them definitely yes.” Since the Vietnam War was an international war, he explained, the antiwar struggle likewise had to be international. Only international unity between activists in the United States, France, Vietnam, and across the world could help halt the war. Affirming this new commitment to radical international solidarity against war, Smale walked across the stage to shake hands with Mai Van Bo of the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris. The auditorium erupted in applause.

Although most Americans initially supported the Vietnam War, some, such as Smale, dissented from the outset. At the forefront of the antiwar struggle were radicals who advanced a systematic critique, arguing that ending the war necessarily meant radically transforming the

system that had created it in the first place. Although marginal for decades, radicals increasingly became a significant force in American politics, in part because of the political turmoil of the Vietnam War. But these radicals not only took the lead in antiwar organizing at home, some tried to internationalize the struggle, contacting antiwar activists across the globe. Although American radicals prioritized connections with movements in the Third World, Western European radicals proved especially responsive, organizing coordinated actions to support their American peers. In France, some radicals hoped to translate this feeling of internationalism into an organized international, in some ways like the radical Internationals of the past. Joined by other radicals in

39 Stephen Smale, “Talk at Mutualité,” May 26, 1966, 1 in Stephen Smale Papers, BANC MSS 99/373 c, Carton 3, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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Western Europe, they also began to insist on the strategic value of organizing an antiwar international among radicals in the advanced capitalist countries of North America and Western Europe. While most Americans in the early years of the antiwar struggle paid little attention to the struggles in Europe, French radicals arguing for the value of coordinated struggle in Europe received tremendous encouragement from Steven Smale that night in 1966.

“What is going on in Vietnam affects the world,” he argued. The Vietnam War, he continued, was part of a much broader global struggle between the United States and movements for self-determination across the globe. But the United States was by no means alone in trying to prevent the people of the world from “putting their own future in their hands.” To continue its foreign policy, which had culminated in the Vietnam War, the United States depended on the support of its “traditional allies,” namely, Western European capitalist countries such as France. Thus, French antiwar activism could not only “reinforce American demonstrators,” but also weaken the pro-American alliance that made the Vietnam War possible.⁴⁰

French radicals, joined by others across Western Europe, articulated these insights into a political strategy, arguing that radicals in North America and Western Europe had a special responsibility to combat the international alliance of capitalist countries that made American foreign policy possible. To that end, they met in Liège in October 1966, and then again in Brussels in March 1967, to build a functional radical international to coordinate their actions, which included a formal secretariat composed of various radical organizations. Over the course of 1967, it grew to include not only many radical organizations in Western Europe, but also in the United States, such as SDS and SNCC.

While the encounter of domestic microsystems of struggle in North America and Western Europe on the one side with a global political ecosystem of interconnected national liberation movements made such a radical antiwar international possible, it was above all the specific characteristics of the Vietnamese struggle that made it a reality. Indeed, without the Vietnam War, there would have never been a new international of radicals. In serving as a binding element the

40 Ibid., 2.

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Vietnamese struggle allowed otherwise isolated activists in not only the United States and France, but throughout Western Europe and North America, to unite in a new international.

Fervent internationalists, Vietnamese revolutionaries, both in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, consciously played this uniting role, giving rise to a new radical international in the 1960s.

Radicals Against the War

American involvement in Vietnam began long before 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson dispatched U.S. Marines to the South and systematically bombed the North. In 1945, American ships were used to transport French troops to overthrow the newly independent Vietnam.⁴¹ During the first Indochina War, the United States provided France with weapons, supplies, and funds to help restore colonial rule.⁴² By 1954, the United States financed about 80 percent of the French war effort.⁴³ When the war ended in Vietnamese victory, the 1954 Geneva Convention temporarily divided the country into two zones at the 17^th parallel, with the North governed by the communist Viet Minh, the South by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem and Emperor Boa Dai, who had collaborated with the Japanese and French. According to the Convention, both zones were to participate in a July 1956 general election to form a unified Vietnamese state. But the United States, convinced that the communists would win handily, blocked the election. As President Dwight Eisenhower wrote in 1954, “I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the

41 Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 1; Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (New York:

Penguin, 2003), 37; Mark Atwood Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 112-13.

42 For the First Indochina War, see, among others, Jacques Dolloz, La guerre d’Indochine, 1945-1954 (Paris: Seuil, 1987). For U.S. involvement in the war, see Gary R. Hess, The United States’

Emergence as a Southeast Asian Power, 1940-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: the United States and Vietnam 1941-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Andrew J. Rotter, The Path to Vietnam: The Origins of the American Commitment in Southeast Asia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Lawrence, Assuming the Burden.

43 Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003), 471.

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time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bảo Đại.”⁴⁴ For the United States, the fiction of an independent South had to be preserved to halt the spread of communism.

American support only grew when South Vietnamese dissidents began to challenge Diem’s rule. In December 1960, the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam (NLF) united all those, including non-communists, wanting to overthrow what they saw was an illegitimate government in the South.⁴⁵ Though initially hesitant to involve itself in what would certainly slide into a destructive war with the United States, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)

eventually backed the Southern rebels with troops, weapons, and supplies.⁴⁶ The United States, which saw the Southern insurgency as part of a Northern conspiracy to subvert the sovereign state in the South, began playing a very active role in South Vietnam, engaging in a cover

actions, increasing the number of military advisors, and authorizing a coup against Diem once his unpopularity fell to irrecoverable levels.⁴⁷

Despite this aid, the government of South Vietnam enjoyed neither the popular support nor the military ability to defeat the NLF on its own. In fact, in its attempt to crush the resistance the government resorted to methods that only increased the NLF’s support among the people.⁴⁸ Desperate to save the United States’ failing client state, President Johnson took the fateful step of throwing the United States into what would become a full-scale war.⁴⁹ On February 7, 1965, Johnson ordered 49 retaliatory airstrikes across North Vietnam. On March 2, the U.S. military

44 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-56 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday &

Company, 1963), 372. For more on Eisenhower’s stance at this juncture, see Melanie Billings-Yun, Decision Against War: Eisenhower and Dien Bien Phu, 1954 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).

45 Mark Philip Bradley, Vietnam at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 94-101.

46 Young, The Vietnam Wars, 63, 69-70; Bradley, Vietnam at War, 89-94.

47 For the coup, see Ellen J. Hammer, A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987).

48 One can mention torture, arbitrary assassinations, and above all, the forced relocations of the

“strategic hamlet” program. See Young, The Vietnam Wars, 82-83 and Bradley, Vietnam at War, 96-97.

49 Fredrik Logevall, “‘There Ain’t No Daylight’: Lyndon Johnson and the Politics of Escalation,” in Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars, 91-107.

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began a sustained bombing campaign of the North that would last over three years.⁵⁰ Five days later, Johnson dispatched 3,500 marines to the South. The U.S. government, despite studiously avoiding the word, was at war.⁵¹

Although the war in Vietnam initially enjoyed widespread approval in the United States, some Americans loudly denounced their government’s policies.⁵² This early, fragmentary dissent famously culminated in a massive demonstration on April 17, 1965 in Washington, D.C. The organizers expected only a few thousand demonstrators; to everyone’s surprise 20,000 gathered in the capital for the single largest antiwar demonstration in American history up to that point.⁵³ The significance of these numbers cannot be overstated. Protesting one’s government during wartime was still a punishable offense. During the First World War, antiwar activists were arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917, and some, such as Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V.

Debs languished in prison for years. In addition, the April 1965 march unfolded in a politically charged Cold War atmosphere still shaped by widespread anticommunism, FBI’s COINTELPRO, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Protesting the government in its war against a Liberation Front dominated by communists could be dangerous, even for those who were firmly anti-communist.

Taking their chances, on April 17 demonstrators picketed the White House, and then marched to the Sylvan Theater, on the grounds of the Washington Monument, where they listened to a series of speeches on the war, interspersed by performances from Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Phil Ochs, and the SNCC Freedom Singers.⁵⁴ In his speech, Senator Ernest Gruening,

50 John T. Smith, Rolling Thunder: The Strategic Bombing Campaign, North Vietnam, 1965-1968 (Walton on Thames, Surrey, England: Air Research Publications, 1994).

51 The best history of the Vietnam War, or the Second Indochina War, remains William S. Turley, The Second Indochina War: A Short Political and Military History, 1954-1975, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009).

52 To take one measure of public opinion, a Gallup Poll conducted in late August 1965 found that 61 percent of Americans felt that sending troops to fight in Vietnam was not a mistake, while 24 percent said it was.

53 “SDS to Sponsor Vietnam March,” SDS Bulletin 3, no. 4 (January 1965): 14.

54 Paul Booth, “March on Washington,” SDS Bulletin 3, no. 7 (May 1965): 10. As it turned out, the forces of order did not harass the demonstrators, though a group from the American Nazi Party, clad in military uniforms and swastika armbands did interrupt the rally, chanting, “gas the peace

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one of only two members of Congress not to vote for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, demanded the “immediate cessation of our bombing in North Vietnam.”⁵⁵ Stoughton Lynd spoke of French activists who opposed the Algerian War.⁵⁶ Paul Potter, the President of the Students for a Democratic Society, ended the rally with a rousing call to build a mass movement to end the war.

“I believe that the administration is serious about expanding the war in Asia,” he said. “The question is whether the people here are as serious about ending it.”⁵⁷ The only way to do that, he explained, was to build a “massive social movement,” a “movement rather than a protest or some series of protests.”⁵⁸

By 1965, something like an “antiwar movement” was beginning to take shape, though this never approached anything like a singular, coherent movement. In fact, what is often

misremembered as “the antiwar movement” was a very amorphous collection of diverse political currents united only by a general opposition to the Vietnam War.⁵⁹ Although they occasionally coordinated their actions, especially for large marches such as this one, groups remained fiercely independent of one another. They issued from different political backgrounds, pursued different tactics, opposed the war for different reasons, and championed wildly different courses of action – from negotiated settlement, to gradual American withdrawal, to total communist victory. As the April 17 march revealed, the American “antiwar movement” was a cacophonous hodgepodge of

creeps.” “Thousands of Students in Capital Protest the War,” Los Angeles Times, April 18, 1965, 1 55 Quoted in “15,000 White house Pickets Denounce Vietnam War,” The New York Times, April 18, 1965, 3.

56 Fred Halstead, Out Now!: A Participant’s Account of the American Movement Against the Vietnam War (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 41.

57 Paul Potter, “The Incredible War,” April 17, 1965, Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/potter-the-incredible-war-speech-text/. An abridged version can be found in “Takin’ it to the Streets”: A Sixties Reader, eds. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 174-78.

58 Ibid.

59 Melvin Small, Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds (Wilmington, D.C.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2002), 3-9.

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isolationists, pacifists, liberals, civil rights activists, black nationalists, anti-communists, social democrats, Communists, anti-revisionists, and socialists of various stripes.⁶⁰

Though most antiwar dissenters were politically moderate, some identified with the radical left.⁶¹ Contrary to the claims of American anti-communist propaganda, the most

conservative of these was in fact the Communist Party USA. For although the CPUSA survived McCarthyism, the party emerged not only numerically diminished, but also far more moderate, having effectively abandoned the goal of revolution. During the Vietnam War, the party opposed immediate withdrawal with the slogan, “Negotiate Now,” which infuriated those further to the left who felt that calling for negotiations implied that the United States had a right to be in Southeast Asia in the first place. Organizationally, the CPUSA matched its reformist line by trying to channel the antiwar movement into a narrow electoralism, at times supporting the Democratic Party. But if the CPUSA was clearly no longer radical as a national organization, some individual communists still were.

The largest of these radical formations was Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Originally founded as the youth affiliate of the League for Industrial Democracy, SDS won its independence in the 1960s, emerging as a beacon for a new generation of activists hoping to move beyond what they called the “Old Left.” Championing participatory democracy, the struggle for racial equality, and a kind of anti-anti-communism, SDS became the premier organization of the white “New Left” – by 1969, membership peaked at about 100,000. Although claiming a few socialist members, in its early years SDS was rather moderate, especially at the national level.

For example, at the National Council meeting in December 1964, SDSers voted against two antiwar proposals – one to organize draft resistance and the other to send medical supplies to

60 Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield offer a good survey of the distinct and often antagonistic antiwar currents in An American Ordeal: The Antiwar Movement of the Vietnam Era (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

61 For an overview of American radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, see Howard Brick and

Christopher Phelps, Radicals in America: The U.S. Left since the Second World War (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2015).

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Vietnam – for being too radical.⁶² That said, SDS was the one of the first to appreciate the importance of Vietnam and organized the April 1965 event.⁶³

Also in attendance that day were members of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. One of the leading civil rights organizations, SNCC was known above all for its grassroots organizing, taking the lead in sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration campaigns in the South. Although a primarily civil rights organization, many in the group connected the struggle for rights at home with the war abroad. But while some individuals publicly opposed the war – SNCC leader Bob Moses spoke at the April 17 demonstration – others in the group were reluctant to formally condemn the U.S. government, fearing loss of state support and cuts in funds. But in January 1966, after much debate, SNCC became the first civil rights organization to formally condemn the Vietnam War, openly encouraging draft resistance.⁶⁴

Another group that would play an enormous role in the American antiwar movement was the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party. The SWP, which advanced the slogan, “U.S. Out Now,”

advocated mass demonstrations, but consistently opposed civil disobedience, which the party feared would alienate the broader American public – a stance that would put the SWP at odds with others on the far left as the decade progressed. Through its youth affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the SWP exerted considerable influence over a number of antiwar initiatives, winning near complete control of the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, a coalition that would boast some 100,000 members.⁶⁵ Unsurprisingly, the SWP and YSA’s role raised many criticisms. Some felt the SWP’s influence proved vital to antiwar effort;

62 Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 13.

63 The best history of SDS remains Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS (New York: Random House, 1973).

Other works include, David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed (Jackson, MI:

University of Mississippi, 2008); G. Louis Heath, ed., Vandals in the Bomb Factory: The History and Literature of the Students for a Democratic Society (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1976).

64 For SNCC, see Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964);

Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1981); Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, A Circle of Trust: Remembering SNCC (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Wesley C. Hogan, Many Hearts, One Mind:

SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007); Faith S.

Holsaert, Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2010).

65 Sale, SDS, 664.

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others argued that the SWP was merely using the war to recruit members, discomfit rivals, and impose its own agenda.⁶⁶ Irrespective of one’s attitude to the SWP, it is undeniable that the party worked its way to the center of antiwar organizing in the United States.⁶⁷

Lastly, there was Progressive Labor (PL). Critical of their party’s growing moderation, a number of Communists broke with the CPUSA in the fall of 1961, forming an anti-revisionist organization by the name of Progressive Labor in 1962. PL was fiercely anti-imperialist, followed the Chinese line, and organized illegal trips to Cuba. Although mostly comprised of older

militants, through its influence over the May Second Movement (M2M), PL also enjoyed contacts with the burgeoning youth movement. For its part, M2M, which had emerged out of coordinated demonstrations on May 2, 1964 in New York, San Francisco, and several other cities, became the first far left youth group to focus on Vietnam.⁶⁸ M2M soon earned a reputation as one of the

militants, through its influence over the May Second Movement (M2M), PL also enjoyed contacts with the burgeoning youth movement. For its part, M2M, which had emerged out of coordinated demonstrations on May 2, 1964 in New York, San Francisco, and several other cities, became the first far left youth group to focus on Vietnam.⁶⁸ M2M soon earned a reputation as one of the