Spring 1971 represented the final consequential leftist and radical impact on the Vietnam antiwar movement. The spring offensive demonstrations took place in a compressed two-week period in Washington, DC. Veterans also played a key role in revealing American war crimes. Liberals maintained antiwar pressure largely by concentrating on the continuing US air war. Allies within the government helped produce the twenty-sixth constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to eighteen. The movement continued evolving during the 1972 presidential contest. National coalitions and mass demonstrations gave way to smaller collaborations and more focused projects. Military veterans conducted war crimes investigations, activists withheld war taxes and pressured corporate militarists, citizens defended First Amendment rights against government disinformation, unique projects provided entertainment and advertising, and the entire movement confronted the air war. As military realities brought the war’s end closer, the antiwar movement mobilized street demonstrations but worked primarily through electoral politics.

Antiwar sentiment grew during 1967. Divided over some issues, the movement’s decentralized nature resisted control by any one faction and it advanced along coexisting paths. Liberals appealed to moderates through Vietnam Summer and Negotiations Now, but by autumn, leftist influence was more pronounced. Frustrated over continued escalation, some activists engaged in more direct confrontation. Students challenged university connections to the military-industrial complex, draft resistance proliferated through organizations and individual conscience, GI dissent gained momentum, and radicals increasingly adopted civil disobedience, most evident at the March on the Pentagon. New layers of moderate antiwar opinion worked through the democratic process and street demonstrations worked in conjunction with government critics. Government officials tried to undermine this loyal opposition. Harassment ranged from infiltration and sabotage to politically influenced trials. President Johnson responded to antiwar pressure with an optimistic progress campaign that would have serious future repercussions. The movement endured these assaults as a coalition of diverse organizations and perspectives.

During 1969, growing GI dissent intersected with movement outreach and the opening of new coffeehouses to expand civilian/military collaboration. More government leaders publicly supported antiwar activism. The Woodstock festival was the most visible sign of increased overlap between political and cultural dissent. Various elements of the movement coalesced into the most spectacular outpouring of antiwar passion in the nation’s history during the October Moratorium. Repression of the antiwar movement escalated under the Nixon administration. Activists faced local red squads and vigilante attacks on GI coffeehouses, as well as administration threats against the media, conspiracy trials, and intelligence agencies using COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS. The president’s fear of stimulating additional antiwar sentiment contributed to his decision to keep secret his expansion of the air war into Cambodia. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger met with various dissenting groups to buy additional time. Once Nixon developed his Vietnamization policy, it forced the movement to adapt to new circumstances, but local grassroots activism and conventional dissent persisted.

Richard Nixon stimulated the greatest antiwar activity in 1970 with the Cambodian invasion. Massive student protests in the spring grew spontaneously and by fall many campus activists channeled their energy into electoral campaigns. Liberal groups joined them. Government leaders, especially in the US Senate, tried unsuccessfully to restrict the war’s continuation. Leftists and radicals made a splash through the spring New Mobilization demonstrations and with the reemergence of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, but by year’s end the coalition split along ideological lines. By late 1970, mass demonstrations planned by umbrella coalitions were giving way to events conducted by single sponsors. This also reduced the movement’s radical presence. From this point antiwar activism appeared more locally and regionally, even as it retained national impact. Local actions, such as during the national student strike, often appeared and operated without waiting for national coordinating bodies to catch up. Most antiwar events occurred on college campuses and in local communities, not in Washington, DC, and they continued even when the lack of national demonstrations made it appear inactive.

An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

A liberal reformist core dominated antiwar activities through the end of 1966. That year the movement maintained a predominantly decentralized orientation, both lacking and resisting true national coordination. Primarily through grassroots activity, the movement incorporated new constituencies and provided alternative sources of information that challenged the government’s credibility. Antiwar activists pursued change largely through the established political system, but also in coalition building for mass demonstrations and draft resistance. Dissent within the government became more visible, which gave wartime dissent a degree of respectability. Protesting napalm production signified an early economic challenge, and the case of the Fort Hood Three exemplified cooperation between active-duty military and civilian antiwar activists. Despite continued growth and some impressive achievements, the movement also faced more significant government and right-wing opposition, and the war’s continued escalation left many activists feeling frustrated and alienated.

The 1973 Paris Accords provided only a temporary respite from the war. As the war between the Vietnamese continued, antiwar forces focused initially on carrying out the agreement, then on ending US military and financial support for the Thieu regime. The Watergate scandal undermined the final obstacle to ending America’s commitment. The war’s 1975 conclusion brought more relief than excitement.

Following the Tet Offensive, the struggle to define the war intensified. The most widespread antiwar activity during 1968 was mobilizing behind the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Peace forces coalesced at the beginning of 1968 for what many perceived as a quixotic effort to replace a president who had promised peace with one who would actually secure peace. Lyndon Johnson’s withdrawal from the race in late March inspired a realistic potential for an antiwar Democratic Party nominee. Kennedy’s death in early June ended that hope, however, and strained the collaboration between movement insiders and outsiders. Street demonstrations and growing dissent within the military worked in conjunction with persistent critics within the federal government. Liberal emphasis on electoral campaigns reduced their impact in the national coalition. Leftists, radicals, and the counterculture played a greater role in the spring National Mobilization, the nationwide student strikes, and the August confrontation in Chicago. The government used the courts to deter ongoing draft resistance but without noticeable effect.

By late 1964, peace activists coalesced to oppose US policy on the emerging Vietnam crisis. US government decisions stimulated greater dissent, turning a peace movement trying to stop the war’s escalation into a persistent antiwar movement. The movement had three primary constituencies that differed in fundamental ways: liberals, pacifists, and leftists. Their essential arguments fell into different categories. Practically, the United States could not create a stable representative South Vietnamese government from the outside. Its open-ended commitment to Vietnam did not involve vital US interests, would divert resources from more significant needs, and did not justify the costs. Morally, protesters believed that the destruction and cost of an extended war would be worse for the Vietnamese than communist rule and making the Vietnamese suffer for American objectives was ethically unacceptable. Others claimed that the process of intervention violated US political ideals and threatened its democracy. Pragmatists argued that China was the real Asian threat, and that America’s policy was counterproductive by undermining regional stability.

In 1965, an antiwar movement with disparate constituencies united uneasily in a loose coalition, but remained so amorphous that no single entity could provide either leadership or direction. Local actions built around teach-ins, the international days of protest, or as independent events, dominated antiwar activism that year. Peace liberals and pacifists pursued moderate actions such as lobbying, education and persuasion, legal and peaceful rallies, and picketing, while hoping for change through an international solution or the electoral process. Radicals and leftists connected the war with domestic injustice and questioned some fundamental assumptions about American power. Despite its limitations, organized dissent provided a significant enough challenge that the Johnson administration felt compelled to push back. Government officials mixed efforts to persuade public opinion with denigrating activists as communist-inspired or threatening protesters with military induction. President Johnson aimed his April negotiating proposal and a brief December bombing halt over North Vietnam at impressing his domestic critics as much as his foreign adversaries.

North Vietnam launched a major offensive in 1972 and President Nixon responded with intensified bombing. The competing antiwar coalitions rallied modest demonstrations. Militant tactics attracted much of the public attention, but represented an approach overwhelmingly condemned by antiwar activists. The broader movement launched a “spring offensive” that appeared more cathartic than influential. College campuses continued as dependable sites of protest, but Congress struggled for efficacy and public opinion remained ambiguous. Individual organizations or focused alliances provided the most effective antiwar activity. Women targeted Congress, religious groups confronted corporations, and resistance continued within the armed forces, but most activists in 1972 tried to elect presidential nominee George McGovern and other officials who would finally end the war. A final spasm of retribution in December preceded the 1973 peace settlement. The Watergate scandal weakened the Nixon presidency and strengthened congressional authority, which, combined with determined grassroots activities, finally observed the war’s end two years later.

The Vietnam antiwar movement moved along mutually supportive paths; one within the formal political system and one outside. Dissent within the government expanded over time. Distinct elements of the outsider movement exerted greater influence at different points. Liberal reformers dominated until 1967 and after mid-1971, and intermittently during election campaigns and the fall 1969 Moratorium. Leftists were most evident during major coalition events of 1967 through the May Day demonstrations of spring 1971. Massive student protests in both 1968 and 1970 were ideologically ambiguous. Drawing encouragement and political leverage from the “outsider” movement, federal and state legislators and officials in the executive branch played their most significant role in collaboration with the activist core after 1971.