y effort to defeat the communist Vietminh since 1951 and more directly after 1954, in support of non-communist governments in South Vietnam, especially during 1961-1963 under the administration of President John Kennedy. Nevertheless, the relatively low level of the conflict in Vietnam kept it largely outside the realm of public debate. According to Zaroulis et al., "the issue of U.S. involvement in Vietnam was still far from the center of the nation's attention in the summer of 1963."
During the next few years, Wells said "what had started as a rivulet, the protest of a few, grew into a torrent of a vast and representative majority." The genesis of the Vietnam controversy lies first in the 1950s, what Halberstam called "a complacent, self-satisfied time." Most but not all Americans benefitted from the fruits of the great postwar boom. Diggins said that critics among New York intellectuals and San Francisco beatniks "found little inspiration in suburbia, mass consumer culture, indiscriminate cold-war rhetoric, and [interest-group] politics," but they were small if articulate minority.
The controversy and divisions over the Vietnam War proved to be the deepest and most emotionally charged in American history over a foreign policy issue. Antiwar protests were initially organized by liberal, radical pacifist and other fringe groups which had mounted practically the only serious opposition to the basic tenets of American foreign policy in the 1950s, which had largely been directed against the testing in the atmosphere of nuclear weapons. These groups consisted of moderate pacifist groups, including The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), more radical pacifist groups, some of which dated back to World War I, and communists, Trotskyites, Maoists, socialists and others. De Benedetti said there were only a few dozen such organizations in 1960, with memberships in the several hundred thousand range, as compare...