A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (142 page)

After Tet, the “most trusted man in America,” CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, told his viewers the war was unwinnable, at which point Johnson reportedly said that if he had lost Walter Cronkite, he’d lost the American people. Even
Newsweek
—hardly an objective, patriotic source—admitted that for the first time in history the American press was more friendly to its country’s enemies than to the United States. Ironically, the polls showed Johnson consistently drew higher support when he turned up the pressure and when he restarted the bombing of the North. Before the 1968 election, polls showed that no more than 20 percent supported withdrawal, and some of that 20 percent represented hawks who were dissatisfied with the apparent lack of conviction in the strategy.
¹⁰⁵

Coming Apart

No American war has ever enjoyed the full and unwavering support of the entire U.S. population. Federalists threatened secession in 1812 in protest of “Mr. Madison’s War”; Henry David Thoreau was jailed over his opposition to the Mexican War (a conflict that even Lincoln challenged); and the Civil War produced protests against the draft that required the use of Gatling guns to disperse rioters. World War II came as close as any war to unanimous support, and even then there were dissenters. Vietnam differed sharply because without a declaration of war, the administration lost a tremendous psychological patriotic edge. People debated a policy decision as opposed to an act of national security. Moreover, inept handling of the press and failure to propagandize the conflict in the manner that a life and death struggle demands only invited rebellion and criticism at home. In short, Vietnam, in almost every respect, was a textbook example on how not to conduct a war. The media’s proclivities toward an open society increasingly demanded that Americans consider the communists’ point of view and questioned whether U.S. leadership had an interest in the outcome. This, in turn, meant that acts of defiance against the government were magnified, exaggerated, and highlighted.

Real dissent certainly existed. Selective service, better known as the draft, had been reinstituted during the Korean War and had been renewed regularly by Congress. But a host of exemptions, including those for marriage and education, allowed all married men plus upper-and upper-middle-class men to elude induction. This is not to say Vietnam was a poor man’s war. Rifle companies suffered high numbers of casualties—mostly draftees—but proportionately the worst hit were flyers, virtually all of whom were volunteers, officers, and college graduates. It would have been irrelevant if the draft had produced genuine inequities: Radicals still would have claimed such injustice existed. A march for peace took place in Washington in late 1965, and a month earlier the first publicized case of a draft-card burning had occurred.

Pollsters swept into action, measuring support for the war. Unfortunately, polling, by the nature of its yes or no answers to questions, tends to put people into one of two camps, eliminating options. Consequently, depending on the wording of a particular poll, one could prove that the “majority” of Americans either approved of, or disapproved of, the Johnson administration’s handling of the war at any given time. One segment of the population—which grew steadily, but which peaked at about one third—was referred to as doves. The doves themselves were split. One group criticized the Vietnam War primarily on moral grounds, namely, that the United States, as a “capitalist imperial” power, represented the embodiment of evil in the world; whereas communist states, no matter what their “excesses,” nevertheless were forces for progress toward a utopian society. Most of those in this echelon of the dove wing consisted of die-hard communists, dropouts, social outcasts, militant anti-American revolutionaries, or disaffected youths who, whatever their education, were ignorant of the most basic elements of foreign policy.

Another dove wing, the liberal Democrats, generally embraced John Kennedy’s original vision of “paying any price, bearing any burden” to advance democracy, but they nonetheless saw Vietnam as the wrong war in the wrong place. To this pragmatic wing, the general strategy remained sound, but Southeast Asia already looked like a quagmire the liberals wanted to avoid because it also threatened to suck funds from Great Society social programs. Many journalists, such as David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, fell into this category.

The opposite segment of public opinion, labeled the hawks, represented the conservative anticommunists in the Republican and Democratic parties. Hawks viewed it as a critical signal to the Soviets to hold the line in Vietnam as a continuation of containment that had proved moderately successful in Korea, Iran, and—its greatest success—NATO and Western Europe. For the hawks, withdrawal was not an option because it would put into play the domino theory and topple the other states in Southeast Asia, threatening the entire southern fence holding in the Soviet empire. Among the hawk wing of the Democratic Party, the labor unions provided consistent support for the war. After Nixon’s election, the so-called hard hats, who represented construction and line workers, frequently clashed with the student radicals and the hippies at protest marches.

Three Streams Converge

Vietnam was unique in rallying a large core of opponents—perhaps ultimately as large a share as the Tory population opposed to Washington’s armies in the American Revolution. What made the Vietnam protests somewhat different was three forces that combined in the mid-1960s to produce the student mass demonstrations that disrupted American college campuses and ultimately spilled over into the cities.

The first stream to flow into the radicalism of the decade occurred when the baby boomers knocked on the doors of the universities. Boomers numbered some 79 million people born between 1943 and 1960. Coming of college age by 1959 (at the earliest), they ushered in a tidal wave of students into American universities, tripling the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded to twenty-three-year-olds between 1950 and 1970.
¹⁰⁶
The student population—already 2.5 percent in America—further expanded. This demographic quake alone would have sent shock waves through the system, despite the fact that two thirds of the boomers never went to college.

Something else relating to education was at work, however, namely the deprivatization of education in the United States. In the 1960s, the percentage of students attending public rather than private institutions rose from 59 percent to 73 percent, and the image of a college graduate as an elite member of society disappeared when millions of veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill. Public universities reflected this transfer from private to public, especially in California, which opened three new campuses in 1964 and 1965.

By their very size, “whatever age bracket Boomers have occupied has been the cultural and spiritual focal point for American society as a whole.”
¹⁰⁷
More bluntly, it was always about
them,
and most of the cultural and spiritual trends were troubling: the boomer generation’s death rates from suicide, drunk driving, illegitimate births, and crime set records, relatively and absolutely. The incidence of serious crime rose twice as fast for the boomer generation as for the population as a whole.
¹⁰⁸
Meanwhile, families in which boomers were raised as well as their own marriages fell apart with growing frequency, with the ratio of divorces to marriages going from one in six in 1940 to one in three by 1970.

It is from this background of abundance, self-centeredness, and permissiveness, combined with instability and lack of direction, that the boomer students arrived on university campuses in the early to mid-1960s.
¹⁰⁹
Because of lower standards, American university enrollment rose from 3.6 million students in 1960 to 9.4 million by 1975, when baby-boom enrollments began to flag. More than a thousand new colleges or universities—not counting hundreds of community colleges and technical and trade schools—opened during the expansion. In 1950, the United States had 1,859 public and private institutions of higher education, a number that had risen to 3,055 by 1975.
¹¹⁰

Most of these were public universities (1,454, in 1975), reflecting the national sense that a college education was desirable and that a means to guarantee a college education needed to come from tax dollars. As a precursor to these attitudes, several studies purported to show that from 1947 to 1958 the “knowledge industry” had accounted for more than 28 percent of the nation’s income, growing twice as fast as the GNP.
¹¹¹
Other scholars argued that it had increased the nation’s wealth by more than half, and Clark Kerr likened the university’s transforming effect on the economy to that of the railroads.
¹¹²
By the end of the 1960s, nearly half of all young men were going to college, while at the same time a striking grade inflation had started, which was more pronounced for the boomer generation than any other in history. The average collegiate grade rose from C+ to B between 1969 and 1971, overlapping a historical SAT slide of at least 24 points for some schools and up to 50 points for others.
¹¹³
Never was getting a good grade so easy for so many people, yet never had it represented so little.

Some of the incentive for obtaining a higher education came from the oft-cited income statistics showing there existed a direct correlation between years of schooling and salary. In 1949, when the boomers’ parents began to contemplate the future, the after-tax lifetime income for a person completing sixteen years of school was almost double that of a person with an eighth-grade education, a precursor to the late twentieth century, when real wages for those with less than a high school diploma fell, compared to college graduates, whose income rose at a strong rate.
¹¹⁴
Between 1956 and 1972, the lifetime income of men with college educations had increased to almost twice that of male high school graduates.

In the process of appreciating the genuine benefits of education, however, Americans deified the college degree, endowing it with magical powers of transformation that it never possessed. This nearly religious faith in education spending accounted for a second major factor that helped foster student riots in the 1960s: money, especially federal dollars. It began in 1958, when the National Defense Education Act not only expanded the federal education budget, but also marked the key shift by making Uncle Sam “the financial dynamic of education.”
¹¹⁵
During the Great Society, Washington earmarked still more money for education, particularly for less affluent students. The flood of money was, as usual, well intended. Congress had originally sought to buttress math, science, and engineering programs at colleges and universities. In fact, the money merely filtered through the math and science programs in true academic egalitarian fashion on its way to liberal arts and social science programs.

This development by itself might not have produced such a disaster in other eras. In the 1960s, however, a third element combined with the explosion in student numbers and the rising tide of funding, namely, the leftward tilt of the faculty on campus. The academy always tended toward liberalism, but liberal inclinations were kept in check by religion, government, and society to render a relative degree of political balance for more than a century. In the 1930s, the artistic and intellectual elites rejected capitalism, many going so far as to endorse Stalinism. One study, at Bennington College from 1935 to 1939, showed that students’ attitudes swayed dramatically as they matriculated through the university. Some 62 percent entered Bennington as Republicans, but by the time they graduated only 15 percent still considered themselves Republicans. On the other hand, the number of those who considered themselves socialist or communist
tripled
during the same period.
¹¹⁶

With the end of McCarthyism, many universities found that not only could they not discriminate against communists, but they no longer had any right to question radical scholarship either. After all, the thinking went, “Who’s to say what’s right or wrong?” Such views did not go far in science, business, or engineering, but the requirements at most universities in general education fields meant that the extremely activist and liberal faculty elements were concentrated into required classes in history, English, philosophy, and social sciences—in other words, where they would reach the most students.

At the same time, students were inadequately grounded in the basic principles of capitalism or communism. By the end of 1962, the New York
Times
noted a discernible national trend against teaching about communism in schools.
¹¹⁷
The anti-McCarthy reaction at the university level led to a dramatic shift in the other direction. Conservatives were ostracized, viewed as no longer cutting-edge. Tenure committees increasingly had more Marxists on them, and those leftist scholars wielded the tenure knives as freely as the McCarthyites had on communists.
¹¹⁸
In part, this, too, represented a generational revolt against established existing faculty in colleges by young professors seeking to flex their muscles against groups (including many World War II vets) that they thought had given inordinate support to McCarthy’s movement.
¹¹⁹
Consequently, just when students cognitively reached an age where they could understand the deeper issues of capitalism and communism, they arrived at universities ill prepared to challenge the increasingly radical university faculty they were likely to encounter in required classes.

Yet it would be inaccurate to portray the student protest movement as directed by the professors. Although faculty advisers may have provided ammunition for the cause, it was radical students who led the attack. Many of the agitators’ leaders were “red-diaper babies” whose parents were Communist Party members or socialists. Some were not even students at the time, such as Tom Hayden of the University of Michigan, a journalist who worked as a field secretary for the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Hayden, later known for his famous marriage to actress Jane Fonda, cofounded the Students for a Democratic Society in 1960 with Al Haber, a local Michigan radical. Haber received support from the socialist Student League for Industrial Democracy. Though publicly anti-Soviet, they had no intention of opposing communism in word or in principle. Steeped in Marxism, both Haber and Hayden hated American capitalism and the middle-class society it produced. The committed Hayden—praised as “the next Lenin”—organized a meeting of activists in Port Huron, Michigan, in 1962 that produced the manifesto of the movement, called the Port Huron Statement.
¹²⁰
The Port Huron Statement enjoined students to seize control of the educational system from the administrators and government, that is, from the taxpayers. Hoping to distance themselves from the Stalinist atrocities of the 1930s, the SDS and other radical organizations called themselves the New Left. One of the key tenets of the Port Huron philosophy was that the United States was the source of conflict and injustice in the world. Equally important, though, was the notion that “students were ideally suited to lead,” and that the university was the ideal location, if not the only one, from which to launch the new radicalism.
¹²¹