During his testimony to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, John Kerry mentioned that in his opinion, “there is nothing in South Vietnam which could have happened that realistically threatens the United States of America.” In that same testimony, Kerry discussed that most people “did not even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart.” The Fulbright hearings were an eye-opener to the millions of Americans who watched them. They convinced many that opposing the war and patriotism were compatible. The movement against the Vietnam War could be said as one of the greatest triumphs in democracy. The war’s purpose was to instill democracy, yet the war was waged with a lack of a constitutional warrant. What started as a few people protesting turned into the majority being opposed to the Vietnam War. The movement involved only a few dozen organizations in 1960, and overtime produced twelve hundred antiwar organizations a decade later. The antiwar movement was spurred by trends and perspectives on the war changing from 1965 to 1973, and contributing events such as the Mai Lai massacre and the Tet Offensive. The impact of the antiwar movement was clearly substantial, by the time the war had ended; the last Gallup poll recorded in May 1971 indicated that public approval of the war was at an all-time low of 28 percent. The movement provoked doubts about the war’s merits among the American public and elites, including in congress and the media, who, in turn influenced other Americans. The threat the movement posed to domestic social stability also promoted public and elite ...
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...rations and American Public Opinion on the War in Vietnam." The British Journal of Sociology 27, no. 2 (1976): 225-236.
Small, Melvin, William D. Hoover, and Charles DeBenedetti. "3." In Give Peace a Chance: Exploring the Vietnam Antiwar Movement : essays from the Charles DeBenedetti Memorial Conference. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1992. 90-95.
Tischler, Barbara L. Sights on the Sixties. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. 197-209.
Verba, Sidney, and Richard A. Brody. "Public Opinion and the War in Vietnam." The American Political Science Review 61, no. 2 (1968): 317-333.
Wagaman, J. Brian. "Antiwarriors: The Vietnam War and the Battle for America's Hearts and Minds." The Journal of Popular Culture 37, no. 4 (2004): 746-748.
Wells, Tom. The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994.
Chris Appy’s s American Reckoning is a book-length essay on the Vietnam War and how it changed the way Americans think of ourselves and our foreign policy. This is required reading for anyone interested in foreign policy and America’s place in the world, showing how events influence attitudes, which turn to influence events.
The Vietnam War, which lasted for two decades (1955-1975), was probably the most problematic of all American wars. US involvement in Vietnam occurred within the larger context of the Cold War between the US and the USSR. It was, and remains, morally ambiguous and controversial. The Vietnam War was slated as both a war against Communism and a war aimed at suppressing dangerous nationalist self-determination. Christian G. Appy's book, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, is a graphic and perceptive portrayal of soldiers' experiences and the lasting effects the Vietnam War has had on the American culture and people. Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, is an analytical work that has three major purposes: 1. to show that those who fought in Vietnam were predominantly from the working class 2. to convey the experiences of the soldiers who served in Vietnam and 3. to offer his own scathing commentary of American actions in Vietnam.
Lawrence’s purpose in writing this book was concise and to the point. In recent history, due to the fall of the Soviet bloc, new information has been made available for use in Vietnam. As stated in the introduction, “This book aims to take account of this new scholarship in a brief, accessible narrative of the Vietnam War… It places the war within the long flow of Vietnamese history and then captures the goals and experiences of various governments that became deeply embroiled in the country during the second half of the twentieth century” (Lawrence, 3.) This study is not only about the American government and how they were involved in the Vietnam conflict, but highlights other such countries as France, China, and the Soviet Union. Lawrence goes on to say that one of his major goals in writing this book is to examine the American role in Vietnam within an international context (Lawrence, 4.) Again, this goes to show that the major purpose of Lawrence’s study included not only ...
Appy, Christian G. Working-class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina, 1993. Print.
The Vietnam War has become a focal point of the Sixties. Known as the first televised war, American citizens quickly became consumed with every aspect of the war. In a sense, they could not simply “turn off” the war. A Rumor of War by Philip Caputo is a firsthand account of this horrific war that tore our nation apart. Throughout this autobiography, there were several sections that grabbed my attention. I found Caputo’s use of stark comparisons and vivid imagery, particularly captivating in that, those scenes forced me to reflect on my own feelings about the war. These scenes also caused me to look at the Vietnam War from the perspective of a soldier, which is not a perspective I had previously considered. In particular, Caputo’s account of
The 1960’s was a time society fantasized of a better world. However, the horrors of the Vietnam War soon became evident; the mass amounts of death occurring because of the war became a reality. It created a “movement”, especially in American colleges, in order to stand up for what they believed to be “right”. By 1970, many Americans believed sending troops to Vietnam was a mistake, however there were also various individuals becoming increasingly critical of the student antiwar movement
Fussell, Paul. "Vietnam." The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. Ed. Paul Fussell. London: Scribners, 1991. 651-6.
The Vietnam War was a vicious conflict predominately between the United States and Australia against The Viet Cong and The North Vietnamese. Initially the public supported the war, however the American president of the time, Lyndon B. Johnson, exaggerated how easy and worldwide the war was to attract further support. When he called for “more flags” to be represented in South Vietnam only the Philippines, the Republic of South Korea, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand indicated a willingness to contribute some form of military aid. By doing this “it enabled Johnson to portray the developing war as international to show it must be dealt with and gain support,” (Hastings, 2003). The outcome of the Vietnam War was ensured because the governments of the United States and Australia could not maintain their publics’ support due to the popular culture of the time. This was because much of the war was shown on television or other popular culture, so events like the Battle of Long Tan could be seen by families and people of all ages in their living rooms; this was the first time they could see how bad a war can actually be.
- Dougan C. & Lipsman S. 1984 The Vietnam Experience: A Nation Divided. Boston: Boston Publishing
The Effect of Mass Media on Americans during the Vietnam War When the war initially began, Dean Rusk, US Secretary of State, pointed out that: "This was the first struggle fought on television in everybody's living room every day... whether ordinary people can sustain a war effort under that kind of daily hammering is a very large question. " The us administration, unlike most governments at war, made no official attempt to censure the reporting in the Vietnam war. Every night on the colour television people not only in America but across the planet saw pictures of dead and wounded marines. Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America--not on the battlefields of Vietnam."
The U.S. Public Opinion as a Major Factor in the Withdrawal of American Troops from Vietnam
James A. Baldwin once said, “The most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose” (BrainyQuote.com). In the 1960s, “the man” was youth across the country. The Vietnam war was in full force, and students across the country were in an outrage. Society needed an excuse to rebel against the boring and safe way of life they were used to; Vietnam gave them the excuse they needed. Teenagers from different universities came together and formed various organizations that protested the Vietnam war for many reasons. These reasons included protesting weapons and different tactics used in the war, and the reason the U.S. entered the war in the first place. These get-togethers had such a monumental impact on their way of life that it was famously named the Anti-War Movement. When the Vietnam War ended, The United States did not have a real concrete reason why; there were a bunch of theories about why the war ended. Through negative media attention and rebellious youth culture, the Anti-War Movement made a monumental impact in the ending of the Vietnam War.
The political and societal ramifications of Vietnam's Tet Offensive indubitably illustrate the historical oddity of 1968. 1967 had not been a bad year for most Americans. Four years after the profound panic evoked by the assassination of John Kennedy, the general public seemed to be gaining a restored optimism, and even the regularly protested Vietnam War still possessed the semblance of success (Farber and Bailey 34-54). However, three short weeks following the eve of 68, Americans abruptly obtained a radically different outlook. The Tet Offensive, beginning on January 30, 1968, consisted of a series of military incursions during the Vietnam War, coordinated between the National Liberation Front's People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), or "Viet Cong," and the ...
Self-Interest and Civilians' Attitudes Toward the Vietnam WarRichard R. Lau, Thad A. Brown and David O. SearsThe Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 464-483
Willbanks, James H. "The Real History of the Vietnam War." ARMCHAIR GENERAL Nov. 2007: 54-67. SIRS Issues Researcher. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.