Give Peace Activism a Chance

On November 15, 1969, a half-million people gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand an end to the Vietnam War. This “Mobilization” was, at the time, the largest demonstration in American history. ¹ Earlier in the fall, President Richard Nixon had insisted that antiwar protest would change nothing. “Under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it” (p. 352). The only college students he would acknowledge during the November “Mobe” were the ones playing football on the tube. His indifference was just pretense. In fact, the White House was in a state of emergency. Outside, a solid ring of buses, parked bumper-to-bumper, barricaded the Executive Mansion. Underneath and overhead, dozens of National Guardsmen and army troops filled the tunnels and catwalks. From his command post in the White House bomb shelter, “Field Marshall” John Ehrlichman was in direct communication with police, FBI agents, and intelligence officers throughout the city. And, as always, Nixon wanted a steady stream of dispatches from the antiwar front. ²

White House preoccupation with the antiwar movement is amply documented in The War Within, Tom Wells’s fascinating, well-researched, though somewhat bloated, chronicle of the antiwar movement. Under Johnson and Nixon alike, that preoccupation frequently became obsessive and paranoid. “The communists are taking over the country,” Johnson ranted in 1967 (p. 205), and Nixon once demanded that a single picketer be removed from Lafayette Park because he was annoyed by the protester’s sign. Both administrations concocted hundreds of plans, not always executed, to attack, spy on, infiltrate, sabotage, harass, imprison, smear, divide, counteract, provoke, and placate the antiwar movement. According to Wells, the movement was large and broad-based, dedicated and bold, mostly nonviolent, ideologically diverse, and fully indigenous. From the outset, however, the government belittled its size, denied its political and moral seriousness, exaggerated its violence, and attributed its very existence to cowards, crazies, and commies. The government’s “counteroffensive” involved methods that ranged from the base and criminal (e.g., the CIA’s Operation CHAOS — an illegal domestic spying program that lasted from 1967 to 1974) to the ludicrous (e.g., “special consultant” Bud Wilkinson, former Oklahoma football coach, was hired by Nixon to provide advice on wooing American youth). Prowar front groups such as Citizens Committee for Peace with Freedom in Vietnam were established and funded to trumpet the government’s war policies. And if “decent kids” could not easily be found to speak up and “Tell it to Hanoi” (the name of another administration front group) there was always that older “silent majority” of Americans for the White House cynically to court. While some of the government’s programs were no doubt merely feckless and silly, the counteroffensive as a whole probably broadened public animosity toward the antiwar movement and is part of the explanation for why opinion polls in the late 1960s found that a majority of Americans opposed both the war and the antiwar protesters.

Although Wells offers excellent material on the federal government’s battle against the antiwar movement, he does not fully evaluate either its impact on the movement or on public opinion. Of greater interest here is the effect of the activists on the government. This brings us to the core of Wells’s thesis, one that is sometimes buried by the sheer weight of narrative detail and oral history reminiscence. He contends that the antiwar movement did more than induce a bunker mentality in the administrations of Johnson and Nixon. It did more, even, than prompt the illegal surveillance, sabotage, and thuggery that, long before the 1972 break-in at Democratic National Headquarters, was the true origin of Watergate. Indeed, Wells claims the antiwar movement was largely responsible for preventing a longer, bloodier, and more far-reaching war. It “played a major role in constraining, de-escalating, and ending the war” (p. 4). His judgment of the movement’s success is slightly more qualified than that of Todd Gitlin, who supplies a...