Hi, my name is Jahir Williams. I'm a historian. And here are some things you need to know in order to sound smart about the Vietnam War protests. The Vietnam War remains one of the most controversial military engagements in United States history. It was an unpopular war at the time due to several factors.
First and foremost, the United States had not clearly articulated its objectives in Vietnam. Secondly, there was no clear declaration of war. Media coverage of the Vietnam War also turned public opinion at home.
The daily body counts provided by news anchors on the three major networks alerted Americans to the fact that the Vietnam conflict might very well be unwinnable. Anti-Vietnam War protests actually began as a relatively small movement among intellectuals in small circles on college campuses prior to 1965. It wasn't until the war escalated in 1965 that the widespread anti-Vietnam War protests that most Americans are familiar with became prominent. The largest and most famous of the anti-Vietnam War protests took place in October of 1967 when more than a hundred thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to protest the war in Vietnam, one of the darkest chapters in the anti-war history. protests that occurred during this period took place in 1970 at Kent State when a group of National Guardsmen fired into a group of student protesters, killing four.
Anti-Vietnam War protests gained even more ground in December of 1969 when the federal government instituted the first draft lottery, the first of its kind since World War II. This led many young men to flee to Canada to avoid conscription. By 1973, But all of these had the cumulative effect of forcing the Nixon administration to rethink its Vietnam policy. And in that year, Nixon effectively announced the end of the Vietnam War. Young people in large numbers came out and joined what became known as the Red Guards.
These largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate, assault, and in some cases even murder political enemies of Mao and the Communist Party.