Essay: THE VIETNIKS: Self-Defeating Dissent

WHO are they? These Americans parading about with placards and chanting: “Hey, hey, L.B.J.! How many kids did you kill today?” These burning-eyed youths who set fire to their draft cards and urge others to do the same? These interpositionists who stand on railroad tracks to block U.S. troop trains? These professors who insist that the war in Viet Nam is no more than the struggle of the peace-loving peasant to win the national independence and personal free dom denied him by U.S. intervention? What are they? Are they pacifists in any real meaning of the word? Are they malingerers, humanists, enemy agents, internationalists? Are they valuable dissenters in the sense that democracy not only allows but requires?

They are surely not the U.S. majority. Many Americans have nagging qualms about U.S. involvement in a killing war. But the few who openly attack their country’s position with demonstrations and draft-card burnings create a worldwide distortion of the U.S. mood. French radio coverage of the uproar, at least at first, made the U.S. seem split by a profound division of opinion. English demonstrators broke out signs that said WE WANT JOHNSON CRUCIFIED. From his sickbed, President Johnson expressed “surprise that any one citizen would feel toward his country in a way that is not consistent with national interest.” Hsinhua, the Chinese news agency, took deep comfort in the “unprecedentedly gigantic movement against the war of aggression in Viet Nam.”

Some Principles of Pacifism

All this demands an examination of the phenomenon. Resisting war, in forms that range from high-minded idealism down to the most scurrilous draft-dodging, is a perennial U.S. custom. Many Americans, including Abraham Lincoln, were embarrassed to the point of bitter protest at their country’s jumping on Mexico in 1846; rioting draft evaders set part of Manhattan afire during the Civil War. Even draft-card burning is nothing new: Critic Dwight Macdonald put the flame to his in 1947.

The ancestral motivation of war-resisting is religious pacifism. In 1899, Benjamin Franklin Trueblood, Quaker educator and prime mover of the American Peace Society, thought he saw within his own life’s span an end to war. He exulted: “Its days are nearly numbered”—and died, 17 years later, of what his obituarists called heartbreak, as his fellow Americans headed into World War I and death in places like Belleau Wood. Trueblood was in the tradition of a thin but spiritually pure stream of philosophical pacifism that has run through Western society since the rise of Christianity, even though the Christian ethic generally holds to the Augustinian belief in the “just” war. But pacifism has usually found its firmest hold only within small sects, ranging from the Anabaptists of the Reformation to the Mennonites (of 389 Americans classified as religious objectors during World War I, 138 were Mennonites) to the Society of Friends.

The pacifist, by his own definitions, has a moral imperative to stand against war, any war and all war; he can no more have a favorite war than an unfavorite war. Today’s war protest movement certainly includes some such pacifists. But the movement is much more heavily populated by the selective pacifist—the one who, had he been born three decades sooner, might well have been a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War and who almost certainly would have fought against Hitler in World War II. Brandeis University’s John P. Roche, a former national chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, defines this as “part-time pacifism, or liberal isolationism. Liberals who would storm Congress to aid a beleaguered Israel suddenly shift gears when Asia is involved and start talking about ‘the inevitability of Chinese domination’ and the ‘immorality’ of bombing North Viet Nam.”

More disturbing is the incidence of those within the end-the-war-movement who really seem to be rooting for the other side. Automatically among them are American Communists and Marxists who insist that the U.S. presence in Viet Nam is another example of capitalistic imperialism. A bunch of recent marchers in Manhattan actually carried red, blue and yellow flags that, to the shocked astonishment of spectators, turned out to be the banner of the Viet Cong—or rather, since protesters think that term pejorative even though Cong only means Communist, the National Liberation Front.

Other protesters, less subversively, act put of a conviction identified by Columnist Max Lerner: “The idea of being patriotic seems to most of them square and laughable.” In their circles, talk of God and country and Old Glory is for such birds as American Legionnaires or Daughters of the American Revolution. As for the old-fashioned idea of “My country—right or wrong,” the newer notion seems to be “My country—well, probably wrong.”

Questions of Protest

The bulwark of pacifism (even unfavorite-war pacifism) and patriotism (or antipatriotism) is the right to protest—a right secured by the U.S. Constitution in its guarantees of freedom of speech, peaceable assembly and petition. Dissent and disagreement are the essence of democracy and one of its greatest strengths. This is something that totalitarian leaders never quite seem to get through their noggins, and to their later dismay they have often mistaken American argumentation for a national weakness of spirit. The outer limits of dissent are not easy to reach; Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach acknowledges a “large bite of constitutional protection.” But the limits are reached and breached by draft-card burning and other practices clearly against the laws of a land.

To know the Vietnik is not necessarily to love him. At his best, he is inspired by the U.S. civil rights revolution and the practical results of nonviolent protest as applied to that Gandhian principle by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. He has a rather irritating habit of claiming a monopoly on humanitarianism. In justifying civil disobedience or downright defiance of national law, he is quick to cite the Nuremberg trials, which, he insists, made it a matter of international law that the individual cannot be excused for crimes committed by government order; thus cooperating with the U.S. Government in its participation in the Viet Nam war makes a soldier criminally responsible.

With this long-range formation of traditional pacifism and short-range formation of intellectual influences, the war protesters make voluble answers when confronted with the average man’s suspicions of disloyalty, softheadedness, immaturity, or even subversion.

Paul Booth and Richard Rothstein, both 22, are Chicago leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, a “new left” organization. Both have applied for draft deferment as conscientious objectors. They urge others to follow their example, though they oppose such prison-risking stunts as burning draft cards. “We are a moral movement primarily,” says Rothstein, a native New Yorker with a Harvard degree in political philosophy. “It horrifies me that people here can walk around oblivious to the fact that they’re responsible for a war and all that war means—destruction and murder. It’s as if they’d lost all their moral sense.” Booth, who studied political science at Swarthmore College, nods his agreement. “It’s not very descriptive to say the Viet Cong are Communists and therefore we have to kill them.” Concludes Rothstein: “The Communist nations are not a threat to us. The U.S. is more of a threat to the sovereignty of the peoples of the world than Communist China.”

David McReynolds, 35, who speaks for the War Resisters’ League in New York City: “Suppose you’re convinced that you’d crack up mentally if you went into the service,” he says. “You don’t have the requisite philosophical stance to satisfy the legal requirements for conscientious objection, so you’d have to go to jail for refusing to fight, and you’re convinced you’d crack up there. What alternatives do you have? If you think you have to go to the draft board and pretend you’re a homosexual, then O.K. We don’t counsel that, but we don’t think it’s cowardly or wrong.” What about Viet Nam? “We recognize objectively that U.S. withdrawal is going to mean a Communist victory. But it’s their country. We don’t belong there. I would prefer not to see Communism triumph. I’m sorry about that. But we have spent ten years trying to find viable democratic alternatives short of blowing the place up, and we have failed.”

Morris W. Hirsch, 32, a University of California mathematics professor, has been a guiding force of Berkeley’s so-called Viet Nam Day Committee since its inception last May; as such, he has promoted attempts to prevent troop trains from going to the Oakland Army Terminal, demonstrations against former U.S. Ambassador to Viet Nam Maxwell Taylor, and a peace march on Oakland last week. “We are told that the war is stopping Communism and it is preserving freedom in South Viet Nam,” he says. “The second statement is completely ludicrous. There is no freedom there now. There is tyranny. It is as bad as anything our Government can point to under Communism. It may be stopping Communism temporarily, but I don’t think it is the job or in the power of the United States to act as a worldwide policeman, repressing popular movements wherever they seem to be leading to a form of government we don’t like.”

William C. Davidon, 38, a physics professor at Haverford College near Philadelphia, recently participated in a 30-hour demonstration outside the Morton, Pa., plant of Boeing Vertol, which makes helicopters for military use in Viet Nam; he also fasted for two weeks, taking only orange juice, just to help himself keep the Vietnamese ordeal in mind. Davidon devoutly believes that the U.S. is using Viet Nam as an arena in its power struggle against Communist China. Says he: “To engage in the large-scale killing of people when it is not in the best interest of their country but of ours, is a grossly immoral act.”

Ignoring the Obvious

Carl P. Oglesby, 30, is national president of Students for a Democratic Society. The Johnson Administration, he says, “is all wet in its theories about the war in Viet Nam. We don’t think you can explain the South Vietnamese insurrection in terms of North Vietnamese support for it any more than you can explain the American Revolution in terms of French support for it. And if Chinese belligerence is made a point of doctrine, if we really believe there is no hope for us in China, then let’s go ahead and drop the bombs on Peking. But if we believe that a world in which these two powers get along is better than a world in which they fight, then we ought to exercise our imagination to find ways of repairing the bad relations that now exist between them.”

Harvard History Professor H. Stuart Hughes, co-chairman (with Dr. Benjamin Spock) of the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, is chiefly worried about massive bombing as a way of fighting guerrillas: “Is it really my country that is doing this?” Russell Stetler, 20, a Haverford student, travels the nation showing a film called Heroic Viet Nam, which praises the Viet Cong guerrillas; he argues that the Viet Cong insurrection “existed before the Communists decided to take part.” Yale History Professor Staughton Lynd, a top brain of the new left, thinks that “the typical member of the student protest movement believes in democracy and feels the United States has violated the principles of self-determination in Viet Nam because of a fear that free elections would favor Communists.” Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. says that “these students have a strong feeling, as every Christian does, that they have a loyalty to a higher truth than to the national will.” Coffin, along with Union Theological Seminary President John Bennett, Novelist John Hersey, Harvard Chinese Historian John Fairbank and some others, has formed a moderate group of war opposers who, in the words of a spokesman, Penn Kemble, 24, “think there can be a solution that is not pro-Viet Cong, does not involve bombing and burning of villages, and does not involve wholesale support of the military regime of South Viet Nam.”

Thus, in their discursions, dialogues and monologues, the zealous dissidents range wide, sometimes sounding erudite, but almost always misreading, or misinterpreting, or simply ignoring the most obvious realities. Communist leaders certainly make no secret of their intention to achieve world domination for their creed; they have openly announced that their position in Viet Nam is but one step toward that achievement. They would barely deign to deny the fact that if they take control of Viet Nam, they will reconcentrate their efforts elsewhere—perhaps next in Laos or Thailand, but always with the idea that the U.S. is the ultimate enemy. And Americans are fighting in Viet Nam for the plain purpose of preventing such Communist fulfillment.

The Counter-Reaction

How important are the Vietniks? How much influence do they have? Public-opinion surveys show that some 80% of the American people approve of their Government’s policy toward Viet Nam; even among the 20% who do not approve, the active, indeed militant, protester is in the minuscule minority. The Vietniks are not going to be able to talk the U.S. out of Viet Nam. They made their best try last spring, with a tide of so-called teach-ins, at a time when the approaching monsoon season in Viet Nam was supposed to guarantee Communist victories; rather than submitting to defeat-by-weather, President Johnson simply stepped up the U.S. effort. For a while, the Vietnik decibel count dropped, only to soar up again when it became evident that the course of the war in Viet Nam had turned and that, assuming only the will to stick it out, the U.S. and its South Viet Nam ally were on the way to winning (TIME cover, Oct. 22). This being the case, it seems just a bit improbable that President Johnson and his national constituency will suddenly succumb to the revived outcry of a thumbnail minority.

Actually, the most recent Vietnik demonstrations seem to have created a counterreaction. Throughout the U.S. last week, patriotic parades, blood-donation programs and send-a-gift-to-the-boys rallies were being held or planned. Petitions in support of U.S. policy in Viet Nam circulated on scores of American college campuses. Connecticut’s Democratic Senator Thomas Dodd, even while upholding the right of free discussion about all the Viet Nam issues, cried: “We have to draw a line, and draw it soon, and draw it hard, between the right of free speech and assembly and the right to perpetrate treason.” Marine Corps Commandant Wallace M. Greene Jr. challenged the Vietniks to “prove their sincerity” by volunteering for humanitarian programs in Southeast Asia rather than “pass by on the other side of the street with a placard on their shoulder, a song on their lips, and hypocrisy in their hearts.” The executive council of the United Church of Christ came out against “the organized attempt being made to subvert the principle of conscientious objection for the purpose of draft dodging.” And in New York City, Conservative William Buckley dismissed the whole antiwar protest movement as an “epicene resentment” against a “gallant national effort to keep an entire section of the globe from sinking into the subhuman wretchedness of Asiatic Communism.”

Most of the Vietniks are undoubtedly sincere in their revulsion against war. But in their talk about the horrors of the Viet Nam war, they make it sound as if President Johnson and the American majority enjoy napalming children. The fact is that the Vietniks, by encouraging the Communist hope and expectation that the U.S. does not have the stomach to fight it out in Viet Nam, are probably achieving what they would least like: prolonging the war and adding to the casualty lists on both sides.