American Cold War policy was in the background of activism against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and the nuclear-freeze movement of the 1980s. Both the nuclear-freeze and antiwar movements had a 1960s antecedent in the "ban the bomb" demonstrations that grew out of public concern with Cold War rhetoric and policy (Waller 25). Antiwar activism was also a response to increasing evidence of US government policy failures and duplicity on one hand and the example of the Civil Rights Movement on the other (Magdoff and Sweezy 175-6). Nuclear-freeze activism was much more systematically organized. Yet both movements eventually faded. That is the subject of this research.
US military presence in Vietnam dated from 1954, when the Vietminh routed the French at Dien Bien Phu, based on the domino theory, which held that one country after another could fall to communism once the first one did (Eisenhower 537; Paterson, Clifford, and Hagan 380ff). Overt war came in 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized military escalation in Vietnam. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said the US would not withdraw "either openly or under the cloak of a meaningless agreement" (Johnson 541). Meanwhile, conditions at home, aggravated by social and racial cleavages, were deteriorating as tax revenues were used to prosecute war abroad. By 1966 the American political elite was turning against the war: LBJ's erstwhile colleague Sen. J. William Fulbright (548); Dr. King, who criticized the effort "to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which [were] not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem" (King); Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, who were challenging LBJ for the Democratic presidential nomination, partly on an antiwar platform. The greatest antiwar engine, however, was the mass of young people, then of the population at large. The Civil Rights Movement modeled some activism, but government behavior disillusioned many. Antiwar activists at the 1968 ...