The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums (review)

"According to James Farmer at CORE [Congress of Racial Equality], it was 'impossible for the government to mount a decisive war against poverty and bigotry in the United States while it is pouring billions down the drain in a war against people in Vietnam'" (p. 151). Those words, spoken in the mid-1960s, when viewed in the context of early 21st century events (e.g., responses to Hurricane Katrina, war in Iraq), will have a distinct resonance for those who read The Vietnam War on Campus: Other Voices, More Distant Drums. Each generation is shaped by its relationship with other generations and the historical and cultural events its members experience during their formative years of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. For Tom Brokaw's (1998) Greatest Generation those events were the Depression, World War II, and the post-World War II boom years of the 1950s and 1960s. For members of the Baby Boom, the formative event was the war in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War, as it has become known, began for the United States in the late 1950s, escalated through the 1960s, and finally came to an end with U.S. troop withdrawals from Saigon in 1975. The war's immediacy (it was the first televised war in U.S. history), its length (it was the longest in U.S. history), its cost in lives (58,226 U.S. dead or missing and 5 million Vietnamese war dead), and its outcome greatly shaped the views of those who served and those who protested the war. It has had such far-reaching effect on social conditions, politics, and personal philosophy that many Baby Boomers frequently interpret major life events through the lens of the war.

The Vietnam War on Campus consists of an editor's introduction and 13 chapters authored by historians, scholars of American culture studies, political scientists, poets, and a Vietnam War activist. Although he did not provide this structure, Gilbert's book of 13 chapters can be aggregated into three sections. Each of the sections addresses the anti-war movement from a different perspective. The first section focuses on the national level, the second section shifts to the campus level, and the final section explores how the Vietnam War affected secondary schools.

The first set of chapters (chapters 1-3 and chapter 5) focus on reactions to the war by a variety of political and social groups that range from conservative to liberal. Chapter 1 explores the conflicting political goals of the conservative student group Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—opposing conscription while supporting the anti-Communist goals of the war itself. Of special interest in this chapter is the observation that the YAF frequently held campus teach-ins with their ideological opposites on the Left, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The two groups differed significantly on support for the war, but found common ground in support for campus free speech and in opposition to the draft. The second chapter focuses on opposition to the war by the student Libertarian movement. Chapter 3 links two of the era's most important social movements: the anti-Vietnam war movement and the emerging feminist movement. Of particular interest in this chapter is the discussion of the need for women to establish themselves as equal partners with men, even among those one would expect to be most sensitive to women's issues, the male members of New Left organizations like the SDS. This section concludes with a chapter on how Catholics responded to and participated in the anti-war movement. The chapter author nicely captures a "schism" caused by the war by focusing on how American Catholics, a group that had traditionally held conservative values, began to see the war as...