It was 40 years ago today, April 30, 1975, that the Vietnam War ended with the fall of Saigon, today known as Ho Chi Minh City. North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the gates of the presidential palace in the South Vietnamese capital. Communist soldiers hoisted their flag atop the building. Meanwhile, March marked the 50th anniversary of the first teach-in against the Vietnam War called End the War Against the Planet. The ’65 event brought together professors and activists at the University of Michigan to discuss what they called the truths and mistruths of the U.S. government’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Tom Hayden talking:
we’re meeting the Pentagon now on the battlefield of memory, really, because people don’t remember the antiwar movement, and what they do remember of it is clouds of tear gas or people running naked through the streets or what have you. But actually, it was the most formidable antiwar movement in American history. And it started with a handful. The first march in April 1965 was called by SDS, which was then a small campus network that had been based on civil rights and student power. And we were surprised that 25,000 people came. That was then the largest antiwar march in American history, according to historians. Within three or four years, you would have half a million marching on both coasts, so a million, not once, but several times a year. You would have a revolt in the armed forces by GIs who were throwing medals over the White House fence and who were in mutiny. You would have four million students caught up in protests shutting down whole campuses by the spring of 1970. You have 29 people shot and killed in the streets by troops while they were exercising their right to protest.
They were all over the country. The most famous would be Kent State May 4, 1970. But in 1969, the Chicano Moratorium, where the L.A. Times reporter, Ruben Salazar, and three others were killed by the sheriffs. And then individuals here or there. They had been reporting on the Chicano Moratorium and march.
There were eight people, at least, by my count, who died at their own hands, by burning themselves, self-immolation. So, it jarred the country. It also gave rise to peace candidacies, starting in 1966. By 1968 and 1972, you had the McGovern campaign, the McCarthy campaign. And I think if he had not been assassinated, Martin Luther King, together with Robert F. Kennedy, who was also assassinated, might have changed the country in a profound direction and ended the war by 1968. So, the possibility of unity was killed by assassination, and we’ll never know what might have happened.
But it was a vast movement that arose with a handful of people and, in three or four years, threatened power in the United States like almost nothing since, and ended with Watergate and Nixon being put on the run, the second president in five years who had left office. So it should not be forgotten. And the Pentagon has a website and a 10-year commitment to teach the lessons of the war, which has to be opposed. And we’ve actually engaged in negotiations with the Pentagon to try to back them away. Don’t tamper with our history. It’s bad enough you do your history, but please leave us alone.
It started with a mandate and money to give honor and respect to the veterans who served. There were 9.1 million. There are now seven million. They’re dying every week. We’re all old men. And then it expanded into a kind of a false narrative of the war and the antiwar movement, and education materials and curriculum were supposed to be produced. So we formed a committee to meet with them and say, “No, no, no.” And The New York Times wrote a sympathetic article: There goes the Pentagon again, you know, making its own version of history. So, we don’t know the outcome, but we’re hoping that this conference will send a loud message—you know, hands off our history—and that we are entitled to know our history and to act on our history and our lessons to confront the existing peace and justice issues of today.
Port Huron is a town on a lake. It’s in Michigan. When SDS was formed, we had to have a founding convention. We were very proper. You have to found your organization. And I drafted a statement, which was our mission statement, we would say today. And the meeting was held at Port Huron because the United Auto Workers had a facility there that could host a hundred or so people. And the outcome was the Port Huron Statement. And it was 25,000 words. And we thought it was great. We had no idea that it would become a historic document. And we’re now fighting to make it more than a footnote, less than a force, but certainly a factor in our reclaiming of our history.
We’ve never had a reunion. We need to unify now, when we were unable to unify ourselves then. We were too quarrelsome, too divided, too huge. So, we have to have a proper reunion. At the same time, the people coming are all engaged in today’s activities. What’s going on in Baltimore is exactly what was going on in Newark or Detroit during the Vietnam War. So people are engaged in trying to remember the lessons of Vietnam, remember our power, and discuss how to apply that potential to the current crisis, which is so—it’s eerie how familiar it is to the time of Vietnam.
One of the lessons of the war is that we did end the draft. You could be yanked out of your seat and put on the front lines in Vietnam. That ended. But the policy didn’t really end, because they’ve ever since tried to invent new ways to fight wars without a draft. So you have secret armies, counterterrorism, CIA wars. Like, the professional centurions have taken over as our fighting forces, as if no American casualties would occur, and it would be secret. And the news has been managed. What’s amazing is that, Amy, as you know, during Iraq, there was still an uproar in the streets against that war. So, it’s still the same policy, and the things that we considered achievements, like ending the draft, become new dilemmas because now you have the drones and sanitized, almost invisible wars. But, you know, we also have the independent media. We also have people that went through the Central American wars and protested in solidarity with Central America. We have people that are painfully aware that you cannot afford endless wars abroad and address our problems of healthcare, education, job training and restoration of our inner cities. Can’t be done.
— source democracynow.org
Tom Hayden, longtime activist and former California state senator. He was one of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society. His new book is called Listen, Yankee!: Why Cuba Matters, based in part on conversations with Ricardo Alarcón. He is speaking at a major conference in Washington, D.C., this Friday and Saturday called “Vietnam: The Power of Protest. Telling the Truth. Learning the Lessons.”