Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (93 page)

"Eve of Destruction," a popular song by P. F. Sloan, captured the anxiety that many of these young people felt in 1965. Sung in a brooding, surly way by Barry McGuire, it was accompanied by a pounding drumbeat and occasional whines of the harmonica. The lyrics were apocalyptic. "When the button is pushed there's no runnin' away / There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave." Racial injustice was rampant:

Handful of Senators don't pass legislation
And marches alone can't bring integration
What human respect is disintegratin'
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin' . . .
Look at all the hate there is in Red China
Then take a look around at Selma, Alabama.

And Vietnam:

The Eastern world, it is explodin'
Violence flarin', bullets loadin'
You're old enough to kill but not for votin'
You don't believe in war but what's that gun you're totin'
And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'.

By contrast to many of the hit songs of 1964 (the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night," the Supremes' "Baby Love," and the Beach Boys' "Little Deuce Coupe"), "Eve of Destruction" was bitter and discordant. It symbolized a move toward a much angrier, louder—and sometimes deliberately unintelligible—form of rock music that rose in popularity during the late 1960s. Some people thought "Eve of Destruction" subversive. Many stations refused to play it. It zoomed to the top of the charts five weeks after its release in July, the fastest-rising song in the history of rock.
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After Johnson committed himself in mid-1965 to much-increased escalation, a minority of American activists virtually disowned the government. Hayden, the pacifist Staughton Lynd, and the Communist Herbert Aptheker journeyed to Hanoi at the end of the year and returned to celebrate the "rice-roots democracy" of the North Vietnamese state. Hanoi, they said, was not abetting the fighting in the South. The travelers ignored well-documented evidence, available since the late 1950s, that North Vietnam had killed thousands of uncooperative peasants and had imprisoned thousands of others in forced-labor camps. Outraged by the war, the radicals were credulous visitors.
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Other militant foes of the war shared the rage that animated Hayden and his cohorts. Demanding immediate American withdrawal, they attended rallies in 1966 waving NLF flags and wearing buttons, V
ICTORY TO THE
N
ATIONAL
L
IBERATION
F
RONT
. They chanted, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh / The NLF is gonna win." They adopted as heroes not only Ho Chi Minh but also Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara, the Marxist guerrilla strategist who had helped Castro stage his revolution in Cuba. Some were so psychologically alienated as to feel virtually homeless in the United States. They called themselves the "NLF behind LBJ's lines."
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Colorful and quotable, the student radicals received considerable coverage in the media. Pro-war Americans were quick to blame them for impeding the war effort. This was inaccurate, however, in important respects. Nothing that the students said or did at that time weakened Johnson's resolve to escalate the war. Anti-war activists enjoyed strength, moreover, on only a few campuses in the United States. The more elite the college or the university, the more likely it was to harbor visible opponents of the war in Vietnam. The state universities of Michigan, Wisconsin, and California-Berkeley were three such places. Prestigious private institutions such as Harvard and Columbia also proved relatively receptive to radical dissent. Most campuses, however, remained quiet until the late 1960s: one careful estimate has concluded that only 2 to 3 percent of college students called themselves activists between 1965 and 1968, and that only 20 percent ever participated in an anti-war demonstration.
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It was highly inaccurate to lump together the widely different institutions of higher education in the United States and accuse them, especially in 1965–66, of succoring anti-war activity.

Class differences in opinions about the war further divided young people (and others) in America. This was a complicated matter, for "attitudes" toward the war were neither unidimensional nor consistent over time. Many people who told pollsters that they were opposed to the war meant that they disagreed with the way that the administration was handling it; some wanted more escalation, not less. Surveys that tried to get at class attitudes, however, did not support the contention that the poor and the working classes were the strongest advocates of war. Instead, they indicated that backing for the fighting was in fact highest among the young (people aged 20 to 29) and the well educated. Over time it became especially weak among the elderly, blacks, women, and the poorly educated. It is therefore inaccurate to argue that poor and working-class people—for the most part, non-students—were the most avid advocates of escalation or that middle- to upper-middle-class Americans, including university students, were the greatest advocates of restraint. To the dismay of anti-war professors, high levels of education did not translate readily into opposition to the fighting in Vietnam.
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Most university students who expressed sympathy with anti-war activity in the mid-1960s, moreover, were hardly radical in their general views. Only a small percentage of them joined SDS or other such groups. The much larger group of anti-war sympathizers on the margin criticized the immoral course of the government, sometimes with inflammatory rhetoric, but hoped that teach-ins and non-violent demonstrations would help Washington see the light. Although they feared and avoided the draft, they were slow to resist it actively—that came later, mainly after 1966. While they pressed the United States to stop the bombing, they were not so likely to demand total American withdrawal, and they hoped for some form of power-sharing arrangement between South Vietnam and the NLF. Given the bloody history of Vietnam, this was a forlorn hope. Many anti-war sympathizers nonetheless clung to it and continued long after 1965 to believe in the possibility that reasonable men could find a reasonable solution.
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Notwithstanding all these qualifications, there was no doubt that radical anti-war activity in the United States was nowhere more visible in the mid-1960s than on some of the most elite campuses. These tended to enroll the most privileged, academically oriented, and highly motivated young people in American life. Why this vanguard of students came to oppose the war remains debated. Feelings of guilt, strongest among many of the most privileged, had something to do with it. So did particular campus traditions, such as the power of pre-existing peace movements and other liberal ideas. Jewish students, many of whom came from liberal or radical families, were relatively well represented on these campuses and in the leadership of some of the campus protests. Finally, many of the most privileged students had the greatest of expectations, both about their own futures—which were threatened by the draft—and about the future of the nation, which seemed destined to disgrace itself if fighting continued.
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Pro-war Americans in 1965 and 1966 were therefore correct to single out university students, whether radical leaders who belonged to SDS, followers who turned out for demonstrations, or young men who feared the draft, as the most determined leaders of protest against the conflict in Vietnam. And because enrollments at places like Berkeley had become so huge—it had 27,000 students in the mid-1960s—opponents of war did not have to muster a very high percentage of students on such campuses in order to bring out a good-sized crowd. Indeed, during the early years of the war university students (and organizations such as SNCC) seemed to offer the
only
substantial opposition to the fighting, for the conflict then remained more popular than people later cared to remember. Many important institutions—labor unions, corporations, Congress, the media, many (not all) of the churches—either supported escalation or went along with it through 1965 and 1966. Their attitudes reflected the continuing power of anti-Communist opinion in the United States, as well as the willingness of most people to believe what their leaders were telling them. Americans had not become very cynical about their public officials—yet. The "credibility gap" was widening in 1965 and early 1966, but it had yet to become a chasm.

I
N 1967 THE GAP WAS BECOMING
profound. By then Johnson had been escalating the conflict for two years. Military spending was exploding in size—from $49.6 billion in 1965 to $80.5 billion for the fiscal year of 1968—and creating ever-larger deficits.
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Draft calls had peaked. Some 450,000 American soldiers were in Vietnam. Most important, casualties had risen alarmingly since 1965. Nothing did more than the casualty figures, which LBJ could not conceal, to advance the tide of popular concern about the war in Vietnam. This did not yet engulf Congress or other American institutions. But it was spreading beyond the student Left. Casualty reports—and the sense of futility surrounding the fighting—had done the same during the war in Korea. By the end of 1967 the tide seemed threatening indeed to the captains of state in Washington.

Some of the anti-war protestors then began to turn from a strategy of protest to one of more active resistance. Most of this remained non-violent, but some of it was confrontational. Resisters began engaging in street theater and guerrilla actions. They taunted policemen ("pigs"), soldiers, and other uniformed symbols of authority, tossed bottles, and sat in at draft headquarters. Other resisters turned in or burned draft cards, thereby breaking the law, and were prosecuted. In October 1967 the Reverend Philip Berrigan, a Catholic priest, doused draft records in Baltimore with blood from ducks.
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Some young people eligible for the draft went underground, and others fled to Canada and elsewhere. A highly publicized siege of the Pentagon in October 1967—some 20,000 demonstrators took part—provoked brutal suppression by authorities as McNamara watched nervously from the roof.
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Police attacked draft resisters on "Bloody Tuesday" in Oakland in the same month. Prominent opponents of the war, among them Dr. Spock and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, openly counseled young men to resist the draft and were indicted. Some of the militants were devising strategies of protest that would literally "stop America in its tracks."
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This was the radical fringe of draft resistance in the United States. More common, however, were draft avoiders. Ever-larger numbers of young people—most of them college students—sought to avoid the draft by getting married and fathering children, staying as long as possible in college and graduate school, joining the military reserves or the National Guard, or finding friendly family doctors (including psychiatrists) who would say that they were too sick to be inducted. A few claimed to be homosexual, grounds for avoiding military service. The effort to escape induction, which meant eluding the call of local draft boards, could be all-consuming, for men were eligible until the age of 26. "My whole life style, my whole mentality was cramped and distorted, twisted by fear of the United States government," one high school graduate recalled. "The fear of constantly having to evade and dodge, to defend myself against people who wanted to kill me, and wanted me to kill."
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Many of those who sought to escape the draft managed to do so in the late 1960s. Some lived in areas where enlistment rates were high, thereby obviating the need for their draft boards to dig deep into their pool of eligibles. Most of the others who escaped the draft used every imaginable ploy to achieve their ends. Those with good connections—doctors, friends on the draft boards—managed much better than those who did not. Those who had deferments because they attended college or graduate school did best of all, especially if they remained on campus beyond the age of 25. For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.
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No one had intended selective service to work in this way. Supporters of the system, which had been created in the 1940s, argued that local draft quotas were based on reliable counts of eligible manpower and that the local boards—more than 4,000 in all—would do a better and fairer job than a far-off bureaucracy of "channeling" young men in their communities. Some young men would be drafted; others with special qualifications that made them more useful in civilian life would be spared. But the baby boom changed the situation by creating a huge available pool in the mid-1960s. Local boards, with bigger pools to choose from, called far smaller percentages of young men than had been the case during World War II and Korea. So the students and the privileged, manipulating the system, generally escaped service. By 1967 the unfairness of the process was obvious to all. It was a scandalous state of affairs that increasingly enraged working-class young men, their parents, their relatives, and their friends.

It also upset Congress, which authorized changes in July 1967, and Johnson, who began to implement them in early 1968. He did not attempt to stop the deferment of college students. But he said that starting in the spring of 1968, graduate students (excepting those studying divinity, dentistry, or medicine) who had not completed two years of study would be eligible for the draft. So would college seniors graduating in 1968. Occupational deferments were also tightened. Johnson made it clear that he expected draft boards to focus on people who had graduated from college. "Start at age twenty-three," he said. "If not enough, go to twenty-two, then twenty-one, then twenty, and lastly nineteen." As it happened, these moves did not change things dramatically, for many draft boards by mid-1968 had filled their quotas, and a lottery system was introduced in late 1969. But his directions greatly unsettled students and their parents. For the first time, it seemed, the college-educated sons of the middle classes might have to face the terrors of the bush.
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